


The Dreaming Road

by feroxargentea



Category: due South
Genre: AU - Canon Divergence, Call of the Wild AU, Case Fic, First Time, Ghosts of the Past - Freeform, M/M, Wilderness Survival, families
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-25
Updated: 2020-11-25
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:13:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26214661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feroxargentea/pseuds/feroxargentea
Summary: "You put in your transfer, I'll put in mine," Ray said. "Nice working with you."And Fraser's a literal kind of guy, so he's back in Ottawa a full twelve months before he realizes that "I'm taking the transfer" can also mean "give me a reason not to."
Relationships: Benton Fraser/Ray Kowalski
Comments: 22
Kudos: 64
Collections: due South/C6D Big Bang 2020





	The Dreaming Road

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2020 due South Big Bang, with grateful thanks to cj2017 and SpaceTimeConundrum for beta, to ThisAintBC for info about bears and other predators, and to the dS Big Bang community for cheerleading.
> 
> Continuity note: Deviates from canon at the start of Mountie on the Bounty and takes place a year later. A few lines of dialogue have been borrowed from various episodes and repurposed to fit.
> 
> Content warnings: Canon-typical violence and police corruption. Descriptions of injuries. Non-graphic references to domestic abuse (off-screen). References to previous cancer treatment and the death of a teenage patient.
> 
> Be sure to check out mekare's lovely [cover art!](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27698258)

* * *

Fragments of sleet crash-landed on the window, collapsed into droplets, and slid toward the sill. Fraser watched them go, tiny red-tinged hemispheres magnifying and refracting a thousandfold the taillights of the cars beyond. Ten o’clock in the evening, and the street was still choked with traffic.

“You know what your problem is, son?” a familiar voice behind him said. “You spend too much time alone in your head.”

Fraser pressed his fingertips to the glass, testing its chill. Soon the sleet would turn to snow, and the snow would stick, even this far south.

“Alone?” he asked, watching the droplets flare as they caught the scarlet of his father’s tunic. “And how much time exactly do I get to do that?”

His father sat down in the kitchen chair and propped his hat on one knee.

“Look, son, I’m not saying independence isn’t a valuable asset in the right circumstances. There have certainly been times when I’ve been tracking a suspect hundreds of kilometers from civilization, with nothing but a gun, a compass, and a bucket-load of self-reliance to see me through, and if I’d waited for backup I’d still be out there now, frozen fast to a glacier and yelling for a hatchet and a snowmobile.” He waved a dismissive hand. “Not that Buck didn’t bring the snowmobile in the end, but he forgot the hatchet, so it took him—”

“Dad, is there a point to this story?” Fraser interrupted. “Because if not, it’s been a long day and I’m going to turn in.”

“The point? The point’s obvious. You should take the offer.”

Fraser closed his eyes against the blur of taillights while he weighed up whether to argue back or simply feign ignorance.

“Hello? _Hello?”_ His father rapped sharply on the window, making him blink. “Ah, I thought for a moment I wasn’t getting through. What was I saying? Right, that you should take the offer. Cut your losses and go back to Chicago. You’re about as much use up here as a popsicle on an ice floe. No offense.”

“Dad…”

“You’re not cut out for this, Benton. You never were. You’re simply not pragmatic enough for big city politics.”

There was a certain truth in that, Fraser had to admit. Duty had called him to Ottawa and duty had kept him there, but twelve months of acting as personal security detail to a string of politicians had thus far failed to inure him to the constant compromise that government seemed to entail. Its essential principles were surely sound, but the more he was exposed to its realities, the less hope he retained of persuading its practitioners to hold fast to the kind of rectitude and probity such principles required.

His father leaned back in his chair. “Now, don’t go into one of your sulks. Wheeling and dealing isn’t in your blood, that’s all. You’re like me, like your mother. We’re none of us the urban type.”

Fraser snorted softly. “Then explain to me exactly how returning to Chicago would help. No, on second thoughts, don’t bother. I’m going to bed. Good night.”

He went over to the bed that was the apartment’s sole other piece of furniture and climbed under the covers. Turning to face the wall, he pulled the blankets up to his chin in a gesture of finality, though a futile one, as his father had never yet taken the hint. There was the soft click of claws on bare floorboards as Diefenbaker trotted over to the bedside rug and lay down on it. Then the bed creaked as his father sat down at its foot.

“It’s only for a few months, son. Think of it as your duty, if that helps. You’d be a lot more use there than you are here. Those poor new consular staff will never be able to manage on their own. Two young women, alone in an unfamiliar city…”

Fraser shoved the blanket down. “Oh, so that’s your angle, is it?”

His father looked affronted, as if Fraser was the one being unreasonable. “All I’m saying is, it’s natural for a man to want grandchildren. And I’m not getting any younger, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“Well, you’re not getting any older either, because you’re _dead!”_

His father patted Fraser’s blanket-covered foot. “There’s no need to pretend this is all about me, Benton. I know things haven’t been easy for you, but it’s not too late. You’re still young and healthy, and you still have all your limbs and faculties, more or less.” There was a pause. _“Buck_ has grandchildren, you know. Two of them now.”

Fraser turned over, dislodging his father’s hand. “How lovely for him. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to sleep.”

The mattress springs creaked again as his father stood up. “Of all the unbending, pigheaded…”

Fraser stuck his fingers in his ears.

“There you go again, not listening! Fine, see where that gets you!” His father went over to the closet but turned back at the door. “You know, if this is about the Yank, you don’t have to see him. You don’t even have to tell him you’re there.”

Then he stepped into the closet and vanished into whatever ghostly space lay beyond. Once the door had clicked shut, Fraser rolled onto his back and stared up at the ceiling. It was a very long time before he fell asleep.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Shadows were creeping across the worn linoleum of the Twentieth Precinct’s squad room, gathering in its corners and softening the general air of neglect. Lisa, perched up on the filing cabinets out of the way, drummed one foot idly against the metal drawers as she waited for the shift to change. Most of the station’s day crew had left already, and the corridors were quiet, apart from the occasional slamming of doors up near Interview Two. When Ray, still busy at his desk in the corner, knocked over his coffee mug, Lisa jumped so hard that she banged her heel on the metal.

“Damn,” Ray muttered. He was still mopping at the spilled liquid when Vince shouldered his way into the room and snatched up one of the files from Ray’s desk.

“The hell you still doing here?” Vince demanded.

“Working.” There was a flicker of defiance in Ray’s response, but only a flicker. He’d been there since at least seven that morning, to Lisa’s certain knowledge. He had to be exhausted.

“On the Bernacki case?” Vince flipped through the paperwork. “I told you to close this.”

Ray lunged suddenly, making a grab for the file, but Vince was six foot four; he held it a couple of inches above Ray’s reach, waggling it gently.

“Lemme make something crystal clear to you, Kowalski. Whatever _issues_ you got”—and he paused to make exaggerated air quotes around the word “issues”—“are not my problem. So I’m gonna tell you how this goes. You get your pen, you tick _this_ box and _this_ box and _this_ box, you sign here, and you close the damn case. You think you can manage that?”

Ray’s jaw was clenched. “The vic might still press charges.”

“She’s not gonna press charges.”

“Just lemme talk to her, okay?” He tried to push past, but Vince shoved him back.

“Like hell you are! Sit your pansy ass back down, or I’ll—”

“Or you’ll what? Huh?” Ray stepped forward again, getting in Vince’s face. “You want the Lieu to know about your little overtime scam? Or maybe he’d like to hear what really happened to that girl in Warfield’s club?”

Vince backed up a couple of steps, to Lisa’s relief. She’d seen him and Ray come to actual blows in the middle of the bullpen more than once already. Stupid men and their stupid brawls, like that ever fixed anything.

“You need to get your goddamn priorities straightened out before someone straightens them for you,” Vince said. “Who the hell do you think you are, IA?”

Ray shook his head. “I just need to talk to her, that’s all. Ten minutes and I’m done.”

Vince sneered, but he didn’t try to stop Ray as he pushed his way out of the squad room. “She won't press charges,” he called after him, but there was no reply.

It was longer than ten minutes before Ray was done. Much longer. Vince had already left for home, and Lisa had wandered over to the windowsill so she could watch the neon-lit street outside, when the doors creaked open and Ray came back in, his whole posture radiating defeat.

“Ray?” she asked, turning from the window.

He sat down at his desk and opened the Bernacki file. “Hell,” he muttered to himself. “Waste of damn time.”

“It was worth a try,” she said, putting all the conviction she could into the words. “I’m glad you tried, Ray.”

He ignored her, as he always did. He took a pen, ticked the boxes on the form one by one, and signed his name at the bottom. Then he tossed it into the tray marked “Closed”, grabbed his coat, and left the squad room, turning the lights off on his way out.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Fraser stood at the curb outside the Chicago consulate, holding the door of a taxi for the new inspector. She had so many boxes of gifts to take to her gala dinner that they had filled the taxicab’s trunk and overflowed onto the back seat. He retrieved an errant box from the footwell and tucked it back with the others.

“Thank you, constable,” Inspector Munro said. “Have you given the address to the driver?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Wonderful. Whatever are we going to do without you?”

“I’m sure you’ll manage fine, sir.”

A sudden screech of brakes made him look up. A black Pontiac had just shot past the taxi and then braked abruptly, coming almost to a stop. The driver of the Chevy behind it banged on his horn and started winding down his window in a conspicuously aggressive manner. Fraser was just considering whether to intervene (actual fisticuffs seeming not unlikely, Chicago drivers being what they were), when the black car accelerated again, roaring away toward the junction. The Chevy driver leaned out of the window and yelled something highly uncomplimentary, and Fraser slammed the taxi door in a hurry, hoping Inspector Munro hadn’t caught any of it.

Diefenbaker pricked up his ears and whined.

“Oh, don’t be such a baby,” Fraser told him. “Even if the driver did make a rude gesture, he wasn’t making it at _you.”_ He raised his hand to acknowledge Inspector Munro’s departure and turned back toward the consulate, shaking his head. He really ought to stop talking to the wolf. At this rate, his colleagues were going to start doubting his sanity.

Diefenbaker gave a disparaging sneeze and disappeared into the building, leaving Fraser to follow him in and close the front door.

“You know, I’m only talking to you because there’s no one else around,” he said. “Once my father turns up...”

He cut himself off, glancing round to check the place was empty. It occurred to him belatedly that, in terms of sanity, talking to ghosts might rank even lower than talking to animals.

“Well,” he muttered, sitting down at the duty desk, “at least I’m not yet talking to myself. Dief, wait, what on earth are you—”

Diefenbaker had come bounding back past him and thrown himself at the door, scrabbling in excitement at the jamb.

“Dief?”

Fraser got up and went to the threshold, from beyond which came a scuffling noise like boots on the steps. He opened the door a crack, whereupon Diefenbaker pushed it wider and shot out. There was a muffled cry, followed by the thump of a body hitting the walkway.

“Ow! Damn it!” a familiar voice said. “Hey, Dief, I missed you too.”

“Ray?” Fraser flung the door wide, to see Ray Kowalski sprawled on his ass at the foot of the steps, his arms full of overexcited wolf.

“Fraser!” Ray tried to fend off another frontal assault and got an earful of wolf spittle instead. “I knew it was you! I went round the block again, thinking it couldn’t be, but I _knew_ it was.”

Pushing Diefenbaker aside, he got to his feet and bounded up the stairs. Fraser flinched instinctively, but Ray flung both arms round him without hesitation and hugged him hard before letting go.

“Hello, Ray,” Fraser said, in the most neutral tone he could manage, his whole body tingling from the contact. He clasped his hands behind his back to stop himself doing anything foolish.

Ray was grinning wide. “So you’re back?”

“Yes. Well, temporarily. Just for the time being.”

Ray’s smile wavered for an instant. Then he recovered, stabbing both forefingers at Fraser. “We gotta talk, okay?”

“All right.”

“Great. Look, I got a million things to do, plus I got Asshole over there on my back, so, uh, you free tonight? No, wait, tomorrow?”

Fraser glanced over Ray’s shoulder at the man in question, a tall white man in his late forties waiting in the black Pontiac’s passenger seat, presumably Ray’s current Chicago PD partner. He wore a deep scowl; clearly this was not a good time.

“I should be done with my duties tomorrow by five p.m.,” Fraser told Ray. “I’d be happy to catch up with you then.”

“Okay, cool. I’ll swing by and pick you up.”

“All right.”

Ray’s partner had hauled himself out of the car and come as far as the consulate gate. “Hey,” he called to Ray, jerking his head back toward the car. “You about done with your boyfriend there? Ten more seconds and I’m driving this heap of shit back to station myself.”

For a split second, Ray froze, his only reaction a slight widening of his pupils. Then he clapped Fraser on the shoulder.

“See you tomorrow, okay?” he said, and hurried off toward the street.

“Right you are,” Fraser said, but the gates had clanged shut already, and he was talking to an empty yard.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Lisa sat on the windowsill, watching Ray’s reflection in the darkened glass as he spun slowly round the apartment, lost in the music. Midnight had long since come and gone, but there was no one around to tell him to go to bed.

He’d never been much good at being alone. He’d always been bugging her for attention, or trailing along after Mikey, trying to keep up, at least until Mikey told him to get lost. Some folks did just fine by themselves—better, even—and Lisa herself had gotten used to it by now, but Ray could have done with someone there who gave half a damn about him. Someone who could tell him when his sweater was unraveling at the back, or when his chinos had gotten way too baggy for him and it was time to go clothes shopping, or when he needed a square meal or three instead of yet another coffee.

(Stupid, stupid. She wasn’t there to fuss over him, she reminded herself. She wasn’t his mom, after all.)

She got down from the windowsill and went over to him, fitting her steps around his until she could slip unnoticed into the dance. Clasping his upheld hand, she slid her other arm lightly around his waist. It was a waltz, simple and old-fashioned and full of the comfort of deep familiarity, and she circled the room with him as they’d done a thousand times before in a thousand ballrooms, all those years ago.

Looking up at him now, she felt that slight shiver of dissonance she always felt on seeing him towering over her. It was the way of the world, of course; little brothers never stayed little for long. In memory, yes, but not in reality. He’d been a scrawny kid once, the smallest in his class, but he’d shot up at some point, and now he was as tall and broad-shouldered as the sports stars he’d idolized back then. He was still lanky, though, his t-shirt hanging off him with all the stylishness of a grain sack. _Three square meals, Ray._

Lisa herself was still wearing the same ball gown she’d worn for her last competition. Sequined silk, in royal blue with turquoise accents, the kind of thing she’d thought was classy at fifteen. She hadn’t really grown any after that. Chemo would do that to a person.

“Shoulders back,” she instructed Ray, though she knew he wouldn’t listen. “Frame straight. Come on, Sprout, pay attention.”

And funnily enough, he did straighten up a little. He had all the same natural grace he’d had as a kid, and much the same lack of technique. She wondered whether he’d kept up with the dance classes after she was gone. Probably not, judging by his current style. The lessons had been little more than enforced babysitting at first, just a way for their mom to keep him occupied for an hour or two. Lisa had hated having him tagging along, a dorky, snot-nosed second-grader embarrassing her in front of her friends. But after a few classes he’d gotten really into it, or as much as a kid that age could, anyway. Their dad had muttered darkly and insisted Ray learn to box as well, but he’d let him go to the dance classes every week regardless.

But then Lisa had gotten sick, and no one had had time to worry about either of her brothers much after that. At first she’d tried to keep up the big sister act, reminding Ray to bring his awards along to the hospital and asking all about the competitions: which categories he’d entered, which girls he’d partnered, what music they’d chosen. But as the months had passed, she’d gotten so tired, and he’d gotten so scared—he’d been a kid, after all, and he couldn’t hide the fear in his eyes—and in the end her parents had stopped bringing him, and she’d stopped asking. In the end, it had just been her and Mom and Dad and Mikey.

She hadn’t intended to drop the ball. Besides, she told herself now, it was his life, wasn’t it? It wasn’t her job to look out for him. Not anymore.

“Head up, Ray,” she told him sharply. “Don’t wait for someone else’s cues. Lead like you mean it.”

He couldn’t hear her, she knew that perfectly well. But he lifted his chin regardless, and as the music changed, he led her seamlessly into a tango, leaving space for her as if by instinct, as if he’d never danced alone at all.

  
  


* * *

  
  


The following afternoon, having finished his work at precisely four-thirty, Fraser hung his available clothing options on his closet door and regarded them dubiously. Aside from his uniforms, all he had was blue jeans plus a choice of two clean shirts, neither of which would be suitable for anywhere formal.

“Not that I’m likely to need formal dress,” he told Diefenbaker. “We’ll probably just go to the Nineteenth’s station, or back to Ray’s apartment, or perhaps to a diner for supper.”

Diefenbaker raised his head and whined.

“I’m sure you would,” Fraser said, “but no one’s asking you. And no, I wouldn’t say Ray was looking gaunt. A little thinner, perhaps, but his dietary habits are hardly my responsibility, least of all now.”

Diefenbaker gave a dismissive snuffle.

“Well, you were implying they were.”

That made Diefenbaker turn his back and sit down again with an audible huff.

“Now you’re just being silly,” Fraser said. “I’ve no idea which boy band you mean, and I very much doubt Ray has joined any of them, regardless of the state of his hair. And it’s hardly surprising the Chicago PD’s grooming regulations differ from ours. If I didn’t happen to be in the RCMP, I might choose to express my individualism likewise.”

Which was an out-and-out lie, of course. Ray’s appearance had always pushed the bounds of professionalism, but his current crop of three-inch bleached spikes suggested he’d abandoned all attempts to fit in, toe the line, or put himself in the running for lieutenant any time soon.

(Ray could, of course, shave all his hair off or grow a mohawk and he would still light up every room he walked into. Fraser’s twelve months of isolation didn’t seem to have done anything to fix his issues in that regard. Leaving again was only going to compound the problem, though, and it might conceivably upset Ray too, so Fraser’s clear duty at this point was to keep the tightest possible lid on his emotions. Emotions, lid, check. He was a Mountie, and he could do this.)

He flipped idly through the shirts, wondering what frame of mind Ray would be in this evening. In the surprise of their first encounter, he’d seemed touchingly pleased to see Fraser, but that couldn’t be expected to last. Once he’d had time to think it over, resentment at Fraser’s failure to stick to their pact would no doubt have soured his mood. “Take the transfer,” he’d insisted, more than a year ago now, and there had been an unspoken but obvious “and damn well stay there” tagged onto the end. Fraser mentally rehearsed his excuses for coming back. All reasonable ones, certainly, but his opinion and Ray’s opinion of what was reasonable seldom coincided.

There was a knock at his office door, and Constable Koenig poked her head round.

“Oh, sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“No, no, that’s quite all right. I was just”—Fraser hesitated, realizing he’d been staring at the pair of flannel shirts for several minutes now—“just considering what to wear this evening. Not that there’s a great deal of choice in the matter.”

“Have you got a date?” she asked, going over to the closet door and lifting the red-and-black shirt aside to examine the other.

“No! No, no, no, no, I’m just meeting up with an old friend of mine. Old colleague. Partner. Work partner.”

“Work partner, eh? Okay, let’s see, we have plaid flannel or we have plaid flannel.” She ran a hand down the second shirt and then held it up in front of him, squinting to check the effect. “I’d go with this one. It looks good on you.”

Fraser felt himself blush. “It’s, er…but the other one is newer, so I thought—”

“Yes, but this one brings out the color of your eyes, see?”

“Ah.”

“I mean, don’t if you don’t want to,” she said. “I just think it suits you, that’s all. My girlfriend has one very similar.”

“She does?”

“Uh-huh.”

Fraser considered this for a while. Then he said tentatively, “Ray did once mention that he liked it.”

She shot him a conspiratorial smile. “There you go, then. You can’t go disappointing _Ray.”_

She hung the other shirt back in his closet and turned to go.

“Thank you,” Fraser said hurriedly. “For the advice, I mean.”

She nodded. “Any time. We plaid-shirt enthusiasts have to stick together. See you later, Fraser. Have fun.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


Ray turned up at ten past five in the shiny black Pontiac GTO, revving the engine and radiating the sort of sunny impatience that Fraser hadn’t realized he’d been missing.

“Come on, Frase,” he called. “Time and rush hour wait for no man.”

“Right you are.” Fraser got in, laid his hat on the dashboard, and looked round at the leather interior. “It’s a nice car you have here.”

“This? I didn’t have this when you and I…?”

“No, you were using the motor pool, as I recall.”

“Huh. Long time since I drove one of those.”

Fraser nodded. It had, indeed, been a long time. A long time since he’d sat in any car with Ray; a long time since he’d gotten slammed back into his seat by the force of acceleration; a long time since he’d winced as they shot past a stop sign. It probably shouldn’t feel quite this good.

“So you’re back here temporarily?” Ray said, drumming on the wheel as he waited for the lights. “You’re, what, a loaner Mountie or something?”

“Yes. Well, no, not exactly. I was asked to assist the new staff at the consulate while they found their feet, but my assignment is almost finished. I’m due to return to Ottawa in two weeks.”

Ray digested this silently for a few seconds. “And you weren’t gonna tell me you were here.” Fraser began trying to formulate a polite denial, but Ray interrupted his thoughts. “Yeah, I guess Turnbull’s not exactly instructor material.”

“Actually,” Fraser said, latching gratefully onto the change of subject, “Constable Turnbull is on indefinite medical leave following a road traffic collision with a tour bus.”

“Damn. That’s gotta hurt! So the Ice Queen demanded you back instead?”

Fraser frowned, but Ray grinned at him, unrepentant.

“Inspector _Thatcher,”_ Fraser said with mock severity, “transferred to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service a few months ago. There were a couple of incidents that didn’t reflect too well on the RCMP, and it was felt a change in organization would be in everyone’s best interests.”

Ray perked up. “Incidents? Like what?”

“Oh, nothing for which she was directly responsible, but they generated a certain amount of bad press nevertheless. A well-known Canadian musician was shot by her manager while visiting Chicago under the consulate’s protection—not killed, fortunately, but injured rather badly—and shortly after that an off-duty RCMP officer was wounded in a bank robbery while trying to arrest her husband’s murderers. It was discovered afterward that she was on suspension and that Inspector Thatcher had omitted to check her credentials when she arrived in Chicago.”

Ray whistled. “Shit. You disappear for a few months and the whole place is on fire.”

“Well, none of it was really Inspector Thatcher’s fault, as I said, but it caused something of a scandal all the same. A transfer to the CSIS was thought to be the best way to avoid an unmerited demotion.”

“So she gets to be Spy Queen, huh? I bet she’s loving that. I always knew she could give Saddam Hussein a run for his money. You know what, I bet she had an assassin costume in her closet the whole time. Black leather, face mask, the whole caboodle.”

Fraser let a smile tug at his lips. Back in Ottawa, he’d had to call in several favors to get Thatcher’s name mentioned in the right circles and smooth the way for her transfer. He’d done it for the right reasons, of course—there was no point in depriving the country of someone whose skills could be invaluable, correctly deployed—but it had entangled him further in a system of privilege and patronage he despised. Not that Ray needed to know any of that.

“So they had to drag you back here to train the new folks,” Ray said, “’cause no one else had a clue how the damn place works.”

“Essentially, yes.” Fraser stared out the window, watching the familiar streets go by. “Ray, I don’t mean to criticize your driving, but that was our turn.”

“Nah, this is quicker.” Ray glanced over at him. “Shit, yeah, we’re not going to the One-Nine. They transferred me again, District Twenty. I’ll tell you about it later, okay?”

“As you wish.”

Ray nodded and took a hard left, cutting up a U-Haul van. “So, how you been, up there in the frozen wastes?”

“In _Ottawa,”_ Fraser corrected automatically. “Which is barely three hundred kilometers north of here, as you perfectly well know, and farther south than a wide swath of the US.”

“Uh-huh. So, you doing okay?” Ray looked across, his eyebrows raised. He was waiting for a real answer, Fraser realized in surprise. It was so long since anyone had asked after him with genuine interest that he’d stopped expecting it.

“The posting wasn’t quite what I’d anticipated,” he said carefully. “It took me a little while to settle in, though no doubt the fault was mine. And you? How have you been faring?”

Ray grimaced. “Ditto, only not so much with the ‘settling in’. The Twentieth’s the third district I’ve worked for in a year, so, y’know, not great. But you’re doing okay?”

“Yes. Relatively speaking, I suppose, yes.”

“Hmm.” Ray hooked one hand through the wheel and tapped an offbeat rhythm on it with the other. “Everything’s relative.”

“I suppose it is.”

The Twentieth was closer to the consulate than their old precinct had been, and they reached it in another ten minutes. Ray parked the GTO and shoved his way through the station’s front doors, letting them clang shut behind him. Then he spun on his heel and opened them again for Fraser.

“Sorry,” he said. “Forgot.”

The station inside matched the Two-Seven almost to a tee, except that someone had painted it an ill-advised pink instead of institutional green, which somehow made it seem even grubbier. Ray paused at the duty desk.

“Hey, is Vince around?” he asked.

The booking sergeant sniffed and turned over a sheet of paper, ignoring him.

 _“Hey,”_ Ray said, raising his voice. “Vincent Haslam. You seen him recently? Hey, am I invisible here or what?”

The sergeant looked up at last, scowling. “Try Interview Three.” Then her gaze landed on Fraser. “Oh, hello, sugar! Who are you?”

Fraser took off his hat. “My name is Constable Benton Fraser, acting liaison officer with the—”

“He’s Canadian,” Ray interrupted, “and yeah he’s pretty, and yeah he’s _busy.”_ He grabbed Fraser’s arm and tugged him away, the doors to the squad room closing behind them with a crash. He led him straight through the main office, past half a dozen desks whose occupants ignored them both, and into the corridor beyond.

“Wait here,” he said, pausing beside an open door marked “Interview One”. He touched a fingertip to Fraser’s shirt in passing. “This is nice,” he added, and stalked off down the corridor.

After a minute or so, when there was no sign of him returning, Fraser went into the interview room and took a seat at the table, pondering the booking sergeant’s abrupt change in attitude. Her assessment of him as “pretty” was no more than a minor irritant—he’d been called far worse over the years—but her coldness toward Ray was puzzling. Clearly the attitude of Ray’s partner had not been an exception to the rule; Ray did not appear to be on good terms with anyone in this place, for reasons that weren’t clear. He could be abrasive at times; impatient, certainly; but at the Two-Seven he’d never been short of friends. Perhaps he hadn’t been here long enough for his colleagues to appreciate his worth? Then again—but here Fraser’s thought processes screeched to an abrupt halt, because, wait, it was _Ray_ who’d called him pretty, not the booking sergeant. Wasn’t it?

He was still frowning over it when Ray came back with a stack of papers and two mugs, one of which he handed to Fraser.

“Okay,” he said, straddling the other chair and opening one of the files. “I got an actual ask-a-Canadian type question for you. You ever hear of a guy called Holloway Muldoon?”

Fraser tore his gaze with some effort from Ray’s hands. “Holloway Muldoon?” He glanced up at the grayish-pink walls for a moment, ransacking his memory. “I’m familiar with his reputation, yes, although I’m not sure I ever actually met him. He was a legend in the North, a gifted trapper and guide. A friend of my father’s, originally.”

Ray frowned. “Then he’s one of the good guys?”

“So it was generally thought, until my father uncovered his illegal trade in endangered species. He’d used my father’s good name to help conceal his real motives, trafficking live specimens, furs, gallbladders, anything he could sell on the black market.”

“Gallbladders?”

“For use in traditional medicine,” Fraser explained. “Of no clinical value, but worth a small fortune to a dealer.”

“Eww.” Ray screwed up his face in disgust. “But yeah, that sounds more like our guy. You never met him, though?”

“Conceivably as a small child, but that’s all. You know, Ray, it is occasionally possible to find two Canadians who aren’t acquainted with each other.”

“Huh. Weird.” Ray shot Fraser a grin that made his chest ache. He put down his mug of tea before he spilled it.

“Why are you asking?”

Ray nodded at his stack of files. “Because word on the street says Muldoon’s trafficking more than gallbladders these days. We got some kinda major-league arms deal going down and his name’s all over it. I mean, big-time stuff. Grenade launchers, flame throwers, nerve gas, God knows what else.”

Fraser shook his head. “It must be another Muldoon, in that case. Holloway Muldoon died almost three decades ago, after a pursuit by my father that ended in a fatal fall into Six Mile Canyon, up in the Yukon.”

“Fatal?” Ray asked. “You sure about that?”

Fraser hesitated. “Until now, yes. Why, have you got evidence to the contrary?”

Ray looked down at the paperwork for a few moments, his fingers picking absently at one corner. Then he sighed. “Okay, look, I didn’t get this first hand, but it’s good intel. The ATF got word of a major weapons deal going down in Las Vegas a while back, so they sent a couple agents in. The seller made the agents, took ’em both out. So the ATF contacted the Feds instead, and the Feds sent in their guy, the idea being, get him to broker the deal and then take down the dealer and the clients at the same time. He thinks the meet’s set for Chicago, and according to him, the dealer’s your guy Muldoon.”

Fraser reached for his cup again, casting his mind back to what little he knew of the Holloway Muldoon case. He’d been too young at the time to hear much about it—his grandparents had gotten that closed, disapproving look and shepherded him away whenever anyone mentioned his father’s career at all, let alone its riskier elements—but he’d read the RCMP report on the case when he joined the service. The terrain of Six Mile Canyon had made recovery of the body impossible, but it was a reasonable assumption that the fall had proved fatal. An assumption all the same, however.

“Did the FBI agent make a positive ID on this dealer?” he asked. “I’d like to speak to him, if so.”

Ray snorted. “Yeah, I bet you would.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“No offense, Fraser, but no one’s gonna let you within a million miles of an undercover Fed. Any undercover Fed, but especially this one.”

Fraser almost dropped his tea; he wiped the splash of scalding liquid from his wrist without thinking. “Vegas? Is it—is he—?” he began, and saw Ray’s warning glare.

“Yup. And he said to tell you ‘Armani’.”

“He did? Is he…is he—”

 _“He,”_ Ray interrupted with heavy emphasis, “is _fine._ And he’s gonna _stay_ that way, because we’re not gonna _talk_ about him. You get me?”

Fraser realized his mouth was hanging open and closed it abruptly. Ray’s own face was impassive, aside from a slight twist at the corner of his mouth. But he was police, and he’d been wearing a badge almost as long as Fraser had been wearing the uniform. He had to understand how important this was.

Fraser cleared his throat. “I would really,” he said slowly, choosing his words with care, “like to speak to him, if that could be arranged.”

Ray snickered, the sound devoid of humor. “Fraser, buddy, _I_ don’t get to speak to him. _You_ don’t get to speak to him. The only guy that gets to speak to him is his handler, and that’s how come we get him back in one piece, in an FBI truck instead of a body bag.” Fraser winced before he could stop himself, and Ray’s expression changed. “Sorry, Frase, I know it sucks. But he’s okay, which is more than you knew before. Plus he gave us this intel, and he gave it to us instead of the ATF, which I’m guessing means he gave it to _you.”_ Ray tapped the file. “So. Muldoon. How do we find him?”

Fraser’s mind was whirling; he placed both hands on the tabletop to steady himself. Ray Vecchio was okay, he reminded himself. Ray Vecchio was okay, and he’d reached out to the CPD, which meant he’d assumed Fraser was still there, ready to help. What wasn’t so clear was exactly how Fraser _could._

“I’ll ask my dad,” he said. “I mean, not ask him, obviously, because he’s dead, so that would be, um, impossible. But I can check his diaries and find out how he tracked Muldoon down originally.”

Ray nodded. “Sounds like a start. You got them with you? The diaries, I mean?”

“Back at the consulate, yes.”

“Okay. Let me know how you get on. Our guys in Vegas have lost track of Muldoon already, think maybe he skipped town, so we gotta move on this ASAP if we find anything Chicago-related.”

There were heavy footsteps in the corridor, and Ray’s partner shoved the door open without knocking.

“Hey, Kowalski, you still pissing around?” he said. “Get the info and get rid of the Mountie. We got work to do.”

He left again, the door swinging shut behind him. Ray waited until his footsteps faded, and then shot Fraser a wry look. “Constable Benton Fraser, meet my partner, Detective Vincent Haslam.”

“Ah,” Fraser said. “He’s, uh…”

“Yeah.” Ray hesitated and then gestured toward the door. “Look, I really am kinda buried up to my eyeballs here, so…”

“That’s fine. Don’t let me keep you.”

“I mean, it’s not that I don’t…”

“No, no,” Fraser said quickly. “I understand.”

“Okay. So, you need a lift back, or…?”

“No, don’t worry. I could do with the exercise.”

“Right. I’m gonna, uh…” Ray scooped up his pile of paperwork. “I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?”

“Absolutely. I look forward to it.” Fraser got to his feet and stepped politely aside to let Ray past. “It’s good to be working with you again,” he added, in a rush.

Ray paused in the doorway, a half-smile flitting across his face. “Yeah,” he said. “I mean, it’s weird, but it’s good.” Then he ducked his head and hurried out into the corridor, leaving Fraser to make his own way home.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Fraser’s father’s diaries were not, to put it politely, illuminating. They tracked a pursuit across three provinces and two territories, in a sparse account interrupted by lists of coordinates and endless, tedious weather.

Defeated by yet another entry reading “Wind NW rising, hiked 35 km bearing S by SW”, Fraser let his eyes slide shut and his head loll. When he jerked awake again, for a few baffled moments he couldn’t remember where he was, until he saw the dawn light filtering around his office blinds.

“Ugh,” he muttered, unsticking his cheek from the sheet of paper he’d been lying on. It was the printout Ray had given him, marked “Holloway Muldoon – bulletin FAO Chicago PD”. Behind him, he heard his closet door creak open, and his father stepped out in a clatter of coat hangers.

“You all right, son?”

Fraser flipped his desk lamp off, irritated by the wasted electricity. “Oh, just dandy. Enjoying my privacy, as ever.”

His father nodded, impervious to sarcasm. “Good, good.”

Fraser sighed and rubbed at his unshaven chin. “I was having the oddest dream. I seem to have been having a lot of those lately.”

“About your mother?”

“No…how did you…it doesn’t matter.” He pushed his empty mug aside and took up the slim, dark folder beneath it. “I shouldn’t stay up drinking tea so late, that’s all.”

“Burning the candle at both ends, eh? It’s the bright lights of the city, son, that’s how they get you. It starts innocently enough, with a few cups of tea, and then before you know it you’re growing your hair out, smoking kinnikinnick, and staying at bars past midnight. Your mother wouldn’t approve.”

Fraser ran a hand over his close-cropped scalp. “Easy for her to say. She never had to have a short back and sides.”

“Oh, she did, son, she did. Remember the Great Maple Taffy-Pull Incident of ’65, when we had to cut the pinecones out of her hair with a bowie knife? Well, no, probably best you don’t.” His father came over to the desk. “What have you got there?”

Fraser flipped the folder closed again. “An RCMP professional conduct review dated November 1970, clearing you of legal responsibility for the death of a suspect you’d been pursuing. A man named Holloway Muldoon.”

“What have you got that for?” His father reached for it but then stopped himself. “I mean, there’s nothing in there that you need to know.”

Fraser raised his eyebrows. “No? In my experience, people only say that when they have something to hide.”

“Hide? Who said anything about hiding? Muldoon’s death was an accident, that’s all. He was running from justice. That’s what happens when a man runs from justice.”

“Justice. Right.” Fraser traced the faded crest embossed on the folder. “Justice that you felt fit to mete out.”

His father held up a hand. “Now, I know what you’re thinking, Benton, but you have to understand, that man was truly evil. If ever someone deserved to die…”

Fraser snorted. “Unfortunately for _justice,_ he doesn’t appear to have done anything of the sort. He was seen only a few days ago, alive and well in a Las Vegas casino.”

“That’s impossible!”

“Is it? What makes you so sure of that? According to this report, his body was never found.”

His father took a few seconds turning his hat round in his hands, adjusting the straightness of its strap. Then he stuck it firmly back on his head. “All right, look. Every other case I worked, every single other case, I kept to the law. A lifetime of service, and I never once broke it. But Muldoon…”

“Was an exception? Dad, the law doesn’t have exceptions.”

“You don’t understand. Your mother—”

“Oh, come on, don’t drag Mom into this!”

“I’m sorry, son, but it’s too late for that. It’s twenty-nine years too late.”

Fraser stared at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

His father sat down heavily in the other chair and exhaled hard. “I wasn’t going to tell you this, Benton. Well, obviously I wasn’t going to tell you this. But if there’s any possibility Muldoon survived, it’s your responsibility to track him down, finish the job I started. You owe your mother that much.”

“Why would I…” Fraser paused, his head humming with possibilities he didn’t want to consider. “Whatever happened, it was twenty-nine years ago. It can’t have had anything to do with Mom. She’d already been gone a year by then.”

His father nodded. “It took me eighteen months to track him down. You have to understand, son, we told you the truth as far as we could. We told you your mother had been shot. It was best you didn’t know any more than that. I went off to deal with Muldoon, and I thought I’d done exactly that.”

“But her death was an accident! You said—you said it could have been anyone!”

His father was silent for a while, the only sound the creaking of his boots as he shifted in his chair. When he spoke again, his voice was low and scratchy. “It was Buck who found her body, lying out back, behind the cabin. He’d called by unexpectedly, just to check up on her, and he saw Muldoon leaving. We both knew what had to be done.”

“Muldoon killed her?”

“Yes.”

“He _murdered_ her?”

“Yes. In cold blood.”

“And you told me it was a _hunting_ accident?”

His father glanced away. “That was your grandmother’s idea. She was never a big fan of hunting, and she hoped it might put you off.”

“Put me off?” Fraser laughed, a little hysterical. “You know what it did, Dad? It made me _careful._ I memorized all the rules, I practiced till I could hit a bull’s-eye ten times out of ten, and I made sure I never pointed a loaded gun at anyone—when apparently what I should have been doing all that time was hunting down Mom’s murderer!”

His father tugged at his collar. “Well, perhaps I should have told you the truth, but you were only a boy. How do you tell a child that age that his mother has been murdered, let alone by a family friend? Look at how you’re handling it now, at thirty-six!”

“Thirty-seven,” Fraser said. “You missed my birthday.”

“Thirty-seven,” his father conceded. “It’s always tricky, remembering children’s ages.”

“I’m not a child, Dad! And I have every intention of finding this man.” Fraser gazed down the old report, trying to marshal his thoughts. “I need to get hold of the files on Mom’s death.”

“No, you don’t.” His father got to his feet. “Trust me, son, there are things you’re better off not knowing. Photographs. Everything. You don’t want to see those.”

Fraser glared up at him. “Then tell me how to find Muldoon.”

“Oh, he wasn’t an easy man to track. In eighteen months of shadowing him, I only ever had the slimmest of clues. Somehow he always managed to be where no one expected him to be, and usually that was where he’d just been.”

“He doubles back on himself?”

“Exactly.”

Fraser grabbed his notepad and a pen. “Fine. Every place he went, every associate you know of. Start talking.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


“He doubles back on himself, does he?” Ray said. “We’ve been waiting here for hours, and all I got is a sore ass.”

Fraser gazed out of the car window at the hotel’s weed-infested parking lot. “This is where Muldoon stayed in 1969, so this is where he’ll be.”

“This place was _open_ in 1969. It’s been boarded up since the eighties.”

“He’ll be here. Just be patient.”

Ray lowered his head to the GTO’s steering wheel and thumped it twice. “Patient. Right. If this doesn’t pan out, I’m in deep shit with Vince.”

“He did agree to the stakeout,” Fraser said.

“Yeah, but only because you’d chewed his ear off for ten straight minutes without drawing breath. Much as I love sittin’ around in cars with you, Frase, I got other stuff I could be doing. _We_ could be doing. Whatever.”

“Hmm.” Fraser thought again about the terms Vincent Haslam had used in dismissing him and Ray. The exact meanings still eluded him, but the tone had been clear enough. “Does Detective Haslam have anything in particular against the RCMP?” he asked. “He seems to have taken a disliking to me.”

Ray snorted. “Nah, don’t take it personally. He’s just an asshole. I only gotta mention someone more than once and he never lets it drop.”

“Then perhaps he’s unaware he’s being offensive. Perhaps if you explained—”

“Yeah, no, I think you’re missing the whole ‘asshole’ concept there, Frase.” Ray twisted to peer out of the side window. “Forget about Vince, he’s just a…a gun with an idiot hanging off of it. I hate guys like that, always throwing their weight around just ’cause they got a badge.”

Fraser hesitated. The words “pot” and “kettle” had sprung to mind, given Ray’s take-no-prisoners attitude to life in general, but it seemed neither fair nor helpful to voice them. “Well, if your partnership isn’t working, it’s likely to have a negative impact on your job performance, and his too. Perhaps if you spoke to your lieutenant—”

Ray twitched impatiently. “Look, I don’t have a choice, okay? It’s him or nothing. Guys aren’t exactly lining up to partner with me here.”

“I can’t believe that’s true.”

“Yeah, well, you don’t—” He cut himself off, his posture suddenly alert. “Hey, see that car?”

“Yes.” Fraser ducked lower, watching as the brown sedan pulled into the parking lot. “That could be Muldoon. A rental car, maybe.”

Ray was shaking his head. “Nah, I’ve seen that plate before. MHN612, that’s one of Warfield’s goons.”

“Warfield?”

“Willie Warfield, Slick Willie, one of the biggest mob bosses in Chicago.”

Fraser peeked over the dashboard at the car. “Would he be a viable candidate as purchaser?”

Ray shrugged. “I guess, if it gave him the edge over Vinnie the Hole, the guy that runs the east side.”

The brown sedan sat in the parking lot with its engine running for five minutes before another car pulled in and parked a few meters away.

“WIL667,” Fraser read. “Do you recognize that one?”

“Nah. Could be Muldoon.”

“Could be.”

The driver of the brown sedan got out, and three figures emerged from the second car to speak to him. Fraser craned his neck, trying to see their faces.

“Is it him?” Ray whispered.

“I think so. I—”

They both ducked as a sound like a gunshot suddenly rang out. Ray shook his head.

“Car backfiring!” he mouthed. More bangs followed: definitely gunfire this time. The dealers had clearly been spooked. Ray slid out of his seat, unlatching his door. “Go, go, go!”

Fraser yanked his own door open and sprinted for the parking lot, sensing rather than seeing Ray circling round to his right. Warfield’s goon had jumped back in his car and was firing out the window as he gunned the engine. Bang, bang, bang: three shots, then a deafening volley as Muldoon’s guys fired back.

Fraser ran for Muldoon’s bumper and latched onto it. The car lurched violently as Muldoon and his driver piled in, and then the asphalt was skidding out under Fraser’s boots as the car took off. Warfield’s vehicle turned left; Muldoon’s screeched hard to the right, and Fraser lost his grip, tumbling over and over across the road until he came to rest against the fence opposite, the breath knocked out of him. For a second he lay there gasping, until a shout made him look up.

“Freeze!” Ray was yelling. “Chicago PD!”

Fraser got dizzily to his feet. Across the road in the hotel parking lot, Muldoon’s remaining goon was crouched in the dust, with Ray standing over him.

“Drop your weapon!” Ray shouted. “Drop it or I shoot!”

The man lowered his gun slowly, laying it on the ground and raising both hands. Ray kicked it aside and pressed the muzzle of his own weapon to the man’s temple, his knuckles white.

“Do you want this gun bullet by bullet, or do you want me to pound it into your head?”

“Ray,” Fraser called, breaking into a run.

“Come on, tell me!” Ray yelled at the suspect. “How much do you want it?”

The man crouched lower. “You can’t kill me,” he said, his voice quavering.

Fraser halted a couple of meters away, spreading his hands wide. “Ray,” he repeated.

Ray jabbed the gun harder against the man’s skull. “I can’t kill you? You don’t think so?”

“Ray, look at me. _Look at me.”_ Fraser saw him blink and finally look up, his gaze wild. “You are not going to shoot this man.”

Ray glanced down at the man again, and for a long second Fraser thought all was lost. Then Ray slowly clicked his safety back on, holstered his weapon, and bent down to handcuff the guy.

“Get in the car,” he ordered him, and then, raising his voice to a yell, “Get in the _car!”_

After a second’s hesitation, the man got to his feet and hurried over to the GTO. Ray slammed the door on him, gesturing Fraser around to the passenger side. He paused at his own door, leaning on the car roof, his expression unreadable.

“‘Negative impact on my job performance’, huh?”

“Ray, this is not who you are.”

Ray stabbed a forefinger at him across the roof. “You don’t know that! You haven’t been here! You have no damn clue what’s going on!”

“I know _you.”_

“Yeah, right. From a thousand miles away?”

“From any distance.” Fraser leaned forward, the metal roof cold and gritty under his palms. “Ray, you have as strong a conscience as any man. You don’t need me here to follow its dictates.”

“No, I do not need you here, Fraser, ’cause I got Vince, so if I wanna be the kind of blowhard that ticks all the CPD boxes, I got all the role models I need!” And Ray got into the car, slamming the door behind him.

Fraser sighed and climbed into the passenger side. Ray didn’t look at him as he started the car, and didn’t look at him as he pulled out onto the street. They drove back to the station in silence, and they still hadn’t exchanged a word when Detective Haslam found them waiting to book the suspect in at the duty desk.

“Who’s the perp?” Haslam demanded, without preamble.

Ray straightened his shoulders wearily, squaring up to him like a washed-up boxer going one last round. “Alex Biroczky, one of Holloway Muldoon’s goons. Muldoon had a meet with Willie Warfield out by the old Bellevue Hotel.”

Haslam grabbed the suspect by his handcuffed arms. “Fine. I’ll take it from here.”

“I was gonna—”

“I _said,_ I’ll take it from here.”

Ray tipped his head to one side and then the other as if limbering up for a fight, but then he seemed to change his mind, raising both hands in surrender. “Fine, whatever. No skin off my nose. Get him to tell you who’s next. Warfield’s not gonna bite after this, so Muldoon’ll need a new buyer.”

“No shit,” Haslam said. “You about done telling me how to do my job?”

“I’m just—”

“Fuck off, Kowalski. Go take the Mountie to Boystown, show him the sights.”

Ray stared him down for a count of five. Then he snorted. “C’mon, Fraser,” he said, turning on his heel. “I can smell pizza in the break room.”

He was right about the pizza. They found two Pietro’s Pies boxes abandoned on the lunchroom table, the first half-empty, the second untouched.

“Score!” Ray said, sitting down and snagging a slice. “Finders keepers. Eat up, Red.”

Fraser took the seat opposite, realizing suddenly that he was starving. The untouched pizza was still warm, and he and Ray ate their way steadily through it in silence—a companionable silence, now—until only a few crusts were left. Ray slouched back in his chair, his feet spread wide, the tension draining from him as the food worked its usual magic.

“Is Haslam really going to exclude you from the interview?” Fraser asked at last. “It was your collar.”

Ray swallowed his last bite and licked his fingers. “Yup. Like I said: asshole. Might as well let him do the interrogation, though. He’s good at them, gets results. Muldoon’s guy coughs up the info and my hands stay clean.”

“Ray!”

Ray shrugged. “What? It’s true. We just gotta look the other way, pretend the marks were already on him when we picked him up.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“Watch me.” He gave Fraser a defiant if unconvincing grin, the corners of his mouth unsteady. “Fuck it. Come on, let’s get outta here.”

He led the way back to the station parking lot and unlocked the GTO. Fraser climbed into the passenger seat and placed his hat on the dashboard.

“Can you really not request to be allocated a different partner?” he asked, when Ray made no move to start the car.

“Like that’s gonna happen.” Ray hunched deeper into his jacket and sighed. “Guess you didn’t hear about the whole Botrelle thing, then.”

Fraser shook his head. Back in Ottawa, the temptation to keep tabs on Ray had been so strong that he’d had to force himself to avoid the Chicago newsfeeds completely. “Botrelle thing?” he asked.

“Yeah, it was a few months back, while I was still at the One-Nine. The original case was years ago, but the execution got delayed and delayed ’cause there were appeals and then people intervened or whatever, but by last October it was down to the wire, do or die. And I _knew_ it was a political thing, I knew the State’s Attorney was hot for it ’cause he was running for governor and needed to look tough on law and order—”

Fraser held up a hand. “Which case was this again?”

“Beth Botrelle, detective’s wife, killed her husband? It was all over the news about ten years back. I was the arresting officer.”

“Ah. Sorry, carry on.”

“Yeah, so I knew it was a…a political thing and I should probably just stay the hell away from it, but I couldn’t get it outta my head. I mean, the evidence was good, it was cut and dried, but the evidence _chain,_ that wasn’t so good. And Franklin—Sam Franklin, he was lead detective on the case, great guy—he told me to drop it, but I couldn’t, you know? Even when Bedford ordered me to, threatened me if I didn’t back off.”

“Bedford?” Fraser asked. “Governor Bedford?”

“Yeah, but he was still just State’s Attorney back then.”

“Ah. So what happened?”

Ray grimaced. “I requested access to the evidence, kicked up a stink. But people were stalling, so I ran out of time and Beth got the needle anyway. Maybe she deserved it. Probably did. But you know how it works: you break rank like that, you end up without a partner, and after a while they try and kick you out to another district, too.”

“Hmm. That doesn’t seem very fair.”

“She was a cop killer, Fraser. You can’t defend a cop killer and expect people to back you up. Franklin tried to look out for me, but then he retired, got a job at an insurance firm, so now it’s just me versus the whole CPD. And Bedford made governor, so…”

“So you were assigned to work with Vincent Haslam.”

“Yeah. Which is like, they don’t even need to fire me, they just wait till I quit. Which I’m gonna, ’cause he’s a douchebag and the whole damn place stinks.”

“You’re leaving?” Fraser asked, surprised.

“Yeah. Don’t know where, but I gotta get out. Another couple months, I’m done.”

Fraser looked away; he couldn’t bear to see Ray’s face so set and determined. He wondered whether to try and dissuade him, but there didn’t seem much point. A pep talk on changing the system from within might have worked with another man, but Ray had seen too much to believe in easy solutions.

Ray gave a bitter chuckle. “You know what’s funny? Even if she didn’t do it—Beth, I mean—it was me that messed up the evidence. I found this note on the body, I shoulda left it there but I took it, and they never used it at her trial. They never even mentioned it. And maybe it was nothing, but I shoulda been pulled on it at least, and instead they gave me a promotion. And now she’s dead, case closed, end of the line for her. So if they’re hounding me out of the force,” he shrugged, “maybe I had it coming all along.”

That was too much for Fraser to let lie. He opened his mouth, but then hesitated as he saw Ray shift, bowing his head and covering his eyes with one hand. Ray’s face was lost in shadows, but the gesture was unmistakable. For a few seconds, Fraser sat frozen with indecision, his stomach clenching with a queasy mixture of dismay and tenderness. Then he reached over and laid a tentative arm across Ray’s shoulders.

He’d never seen Ray weep before. Twelve months ago, he might have said it was impossible. Twelve months ago, it occurred to him now, he hadn’t really known Ray at all.

They sat in silence while the parking lot slowly darkened around them. At last Ray sniffed hard and wiped his face.

“Ugh, I stink of pizza.” He scrubbed his hands on his jeans and then turned the key in the ignition, drawing a line under their conversation. “Okay, so it’s late, we gotta make tracks. Where are you staying?”

Fraser cleared his throat. “At the consulate, as usual.”

Ray glanced across at him, the light catching traces of dampness in the lines of his face. “You’re kidding!”

“It’s fine. I’m used to it, as you know.”

“That’s not the point! They drag you all the way down here and don’t even give you a place to stay? Did they give you a bedroom this time, at least?”

Fraser tugged at his ear. “Well, it’s quite a spacious office. If you could just drop me at the gate…”

Ray shoved the car into gear and set off with a screech, his expression closed. “Nope. Not doing it, Fraser. You’re not going back there. It was stupid you ever living there when you coulda just stayed with me.”

“Ray—”

“I’m not discussing it! This is not a discussion! You’re staying with me, _period.”_

Fraser hesitated a moment and then nodded. “In that case, thank you.”

Ray sniffed again and scratched his neck. “Good. Okay. We’ll go pick your stuff up in the morning.”

“And Dief too?”

“Obviously, Dief too.”

Fraser allowed himself a small smile. “Thank you, Ray.”

“You’re welcome. Now stop being a dick and let me drive.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


Ray’s apartment was much as it had ever been. Not chaotic, exactly, as Fraser reminded himself, since there was a degree of purpose to the mess. Books, magazines, and remote controls lay scattered wherever they’d last been needed, and wherever they might be needed next. He stepped over an abandoned sneaker and crossed to the couch, pulling its cushions straight.

“This should do fine,” he said, taking off his sweater and rolling it up for a pillow. “I can use the throw rug as a blanket if need be.”

Ray stared at him and then at the couch. “Seriously? You’re gonna sleep there?”

“It looks reasonably comfortable, yes.”

“It’s a foot shorter than you!”

Fraser started to deny this and found he couldn’t. “I’ll sleep on the floor, then.”

“You’re kidding!” Ray gestured at the dividing wall. “I got a bedroom right there!”

“I know you do, but…”

“But what? You came back from Ottawa, you came back _hundreds of miles,_ and you can’t take one extra step?”

Fraser hesitated. That sounded almost…almost as if it meant something it couldn’t possibly mean. Could it?

“There’s nothing wrong with the floor,” he said carefully. “I _like_ the floor.”

“Nobody likes the floor, Fraser.”

“I do.”

Ray glared at him, his jaw clenched. Then he shrugged. “Fine, I get the message! _You_ don’t need company, _I_ don’t need company, and floorboards are real fucking cozy all round.”

“Ray…”

“Forget it, okay?” Ray yanked the bedroom door open and paused in the doorway. “Look, it’s fine. Just go to sleep. I’ll see you in the morning.”

Fraser watched the door swing shut behind him. He waited a few moments, listening to the banging of drawers and the creak of bedsprings within, but after a while there was nothing but silence. Sighing, he shifted Ray’s bicycle out of the way, hanging it back on its wall hooks, and laid the throw rug down in the space he’d cleared. Floorboards didn’t make the most comfortable of beds, it was true, but he’d slept in far worse places. All he had to do was lie down, relax all his muscles one by one, and empty his mind…

He sat up again abruptly, refolded his sweater, and threw himself back down. The trouble was, this whole place was saturated with Ray’s presence, and with the familiar scent of him. It ought to have been comforting, but when Fraser closed his eyes, all he could see was whiteness. Vast swirling snowflakes, falling thickly, obliterating a shelter staked in a blizzard; the walls of a prison cell, whitewashed and bleak and closing in around him; Victoria's face, a pale oval of despair as she tried to haul him bodily onto an outbound train; the official letter he’d received six months ago from the Denver PD, stark black lettering on creamy paper, informing him of her death while resisting arrest.

He blinked the images away impatiently. Ray might be more emotionally vulnerable than usual right now, but he wasn’t some lost soul waiting for rescue in a snowstorm. He was quite capable of making his own choices, for good or for ill.

Fraser closed his eyes again and made himself count to sixty, five times over. Then he got to his feet and tapped at the bedroom door.

“Ray,” he said, pushing it open a crack. “Ray?”

Ray looked over his shoulder, scowling. He was standing by his bureau, still in his jeans and tank top. “What?” he snapped. “The floor not treating you good? You need an Arctic gale or something, make you feel at home?” He yanked open the closet door, grabbed an electric fan from one of the shelves, and thrust it at Fraser. “Here ya go. Arctic gale. Happy now?”

“No, I—wait…” Trying to back away and fend off the fan at the same time, Fraser caught his foot on the bed frame and flung his arm back to save himself. The fan went tumbling upward, hitting the edge of a magazine on the bureau and flipping it upright, which launched the baseball that had been sitting there into the air. It flew across the room in a perfect parabolic curve, ending with a thump in an old baseball glove lying by the trashcan.

He looked over at Ray, who stared back at him wide-eyed and then broke into a bark of laughter.

“Hey, neat trick!”

Fraser nodded solemnly. “Thank you.”

Ray retrieved the ball and sat down on the bed, still chuckling. “Bet you couldn’t do that again if you tried.”

“I…no,” Fraser admitted. “I probably couldn’t.”

Ray tossed the ball up a couple of times, the muscles of his bare arms cording and flexing. Bare-armed, and barefoot too, which Fraser had always found unsettling in its informality. Ray in biker boots was distracting, but without them he was even more so.

Ray chucked the ball aside and leaned back on his elbows, cocking his head as if sizing Fraser up. Fraser glanced away and glanced back, swallowing hard. Did Ray know how…how _inviting_ that made him look? Yes, he realized with sudden, terrifying certainty, Ray knew exactly how it made him look. Sprawled there, grinning up at Fraser, he was six foot of sinew and muscle, all challenge, with nothing vulnerable about him at all.

Fraser stepped closer, until his knee was brushing against Ray’s. A flush of desire flooded through him at the touch, setting his skin prickling and making his legs shaky, but he forced his voice to stay steady as he spoke.

“I have to leave for Canada in two weeks,” he said, sounding the words out as if reading Ray his rights. “Less than two weeks. It’s twelve days now.”

Ray regarded him levelly. “I know that.”

“I can’t stay longer.”

“Never asked you to, Fraser.”

“Then,” Fraser began, and stopped again. He watched Ray’s chest rise and fall, the ribs of his tank top spreading and contracting as his breath quickened.

Ray reached out with one denim-clad leg and hooked it around Fraser’s. “Then nothing,” he said, and yanked hard, knocking him off balance. Fraser let himself fall forward, landing on his hands and knees either side of Ray, the mattress dipping as he shifted to keep his weight off him.

“Nothing?” he repeated, needing to be sure.

Ray laughed up at him, his eyes fierce and bright. He raised his head until his mouth was bare millimeters from Fraser’s, his lips wet and parted.

“Nah,” he said. “There’s nothing left to say.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


Holding his breath, Fraser lifted Ray’s arm a fraction and tried to slide out from his embrace. If he could just get his leg free…

Ray grunted and turned over, trapping Fraser’s arm beneath him. Fraser froze again, muttering imprecations under his breath. None of this was his fault, he reminded himself. Ray had wanted him to stay the night; that much had been evident enough. It would hardly be logical of him to blame Fraser. Not that Ray had ever been troubled by logic; that had always been Fraser’s half of the equation.

Fraser leaned back against Ray’s shoulder, breathing in the warm air, with its mingled scents of sex, sweat, fabric softener, and just a lingering hint of pizza. He’d long since abandoned any attempt not to get too fond of Ray—to know him was to love him, or so it seemed—but if he’d only succeeded in laying low at the Consulate for a few more days, he could have been home safe, away from all of this. Heartsick, yes, but not freshly wounded. It might have been easier for both of them.

He glanced at his clothes, strewn across the floor. If he could manage to wriggle loose, perhaps he could retrieve them and slip away. He could go straight back to the consulate and no one would be the wiser. Then Ray would be free to choose whichever option suited him: either flip a mental switch and return to normal mode as if nothing had happened—he did have urgent work to bury himself in, after all—or laugh it off and greet Fraser with a sardonic grin and flippant remark, as if it couldn’t have meant anything to anyone anyway. It was hard to say which would hurt more.

Fraser sighed. Maybe, if he could get his arm loose, he could retreat to the kitchen and reappear with fresh-brewed coffee as a peace offering? He rolled his eyes at himself. Of course, because coffee solved everything.

Ray turned over again, one hand landing on Fraser’s chest.

“Ugh,” he muttered, screwing up his face against the dawn light. “What time is it?”

Fraser checked the clock. “Seven twenty-one.”

Ray groaned again and opened one eye a crack. “You okay?”

Fraser looked around the room. “Yes?” he offered tentatively.

“Mm. ’Kay.” Ray’s eye slid shut again, his hand still pinning Fraser to the mattress with the lightest of pressures.

“Ray?”

“Wha’?”

“Nothing.”

Ray yawned wide. “Wha’s matter? You freaking out?”

Fraser considered this. “No,” he said slowly. “I don’t think so. Not if you’re not.”

“I’m _asleep,_ Fraser.”

“Ah. Understood.” He lay as still as he could, listening to Ray’s breathing as it gradually evened out again into slumber, and letting his own body relax bit by bit. Bizarre though it was, Ray really did seem content with the situation—content enough to have gone back to sleep with his face tucked into Fraser’s neck, his eyelashes tickling Fraser’s cheek. The thought brought Fraser a rush of happiness, in spite of the temporary nature of their truce, or perhaps because of it. If he hadn’t been leaving, would Ray have done any of this?

Fraser stared up at the ceiling, thinking back over all the times he’d woken up with other men. Many times, over many years, usually under canvas, of course, or bivouacked under the stars. Innusiq, Eric, Steve, Quinn, and half a dozen others, all innocently enough. Never in a bed, though, and never with a white man, now that he thought about it, although he supposed that was hardly relevant.

Raising one arm, he slid it very gently around Ray, pulling him closer. Ray yawned again and stretched wide, tugging the duvet loose.

“Okay, _fine._ I give up.” He opened both eyes and peered down at the tangled sheets. “Huh. I shoulda known you were a bed-wrecker. Hey, were you really gonna sleep on the floor?”

Fraser stroked Ray’s bed-crazed hair back from his temple, feeling a big, foolish smile spread across his face. “I don’t actually mind the floor,” he said. “I’m used to it.”

“That’s so dumb.”

“It’s true. I even slept on the floor of my apartment in Ottawa for the first few weeks, until I could get hold of a folding cot.”

“Yeah, well, the whole Ottawa thing was dumb too.”

“It seemed the most sensible option at the time,” Fraser said cautiously. “And you did tell me to go.”

“Yeah, but only ’cause I wanted you to fight back! I mean, not literally fight back, but you coulda said ‘Hey, Ray, this incredibly stupid thing here? Let’s not do this!’ and I woulda _not done it.”_

“Well, yes, that is somewhat more obvious in hindsight.”

“Hmph.”

Ray was silent for a while, his smile gradually fading and the frown lines deepening between his brows. He turned over onto his back, scratching at the sparse hairs on his chest until his nails left thin, raised streaks across his skin. Fraser bit back the temptation to ask what was wrong. If it was something Ray wanted him to know, he would tell him eventually, one way or another.

“You know what’s funny?” Ray said at last. “Down at the Twentieth they got me working all these domestic assault cases, and every day, every goddamn day I’m telling the vics, don’t believe your husband, your boyfriend, your pimp, whatever. Don’t forgive him, whatever he says. Go to a refuge, press charges, ’cause he’ll hit you again. The next time he’s pissed, the next time he needs someone else to blame for his shitty, fucked-up life, he’ll hit you again, ’cause they always do.”

Fraser caught Ray’s hand before he could leave permanent welts across his rib cage, and folded it in his. “But you haven’t, Ray. And I don’t believe your heart was in it the first time either.”

“Hey, don’t do that! Don’t make excuses for me. That’s not—I don’t need you to do that.”

“I’m not.” He gripped Ray’s fingers, feeling the strength in them, the power withheld. “You could have knocked me down if you’d wanted to, but you didn’t even leave a bruise.”

Ray shook his head, pulling his hand free. “Not the point, Fraser.”

Fraser shuffled closer, nudging Ray onto his side and wrapping both arms around him. “I know,” he said. Not all bruises were visible; they both knew that. What happened that day on the waterfront a year ago had left its mark on both of them.

He held Ray close, their fingers interlaced, until at last he felt Ray relax against him.

“You working today?” Ray asked.

“Not officially,” Fraser said. “Are you?”

“Not officially.” Ray uncoiled himself and sat up. “Okay, so here’s the plan. Step one: go to the consulate, pick up Dief and your stuff. Step two: swing by the station, check if we got any dirt on Muldoon’s next meet. Step three: come back to bed.”

Fraser raised his eyebrows.

“What?” Ray said. “We got, what, twelve days left before you leave?”

“Eleven, now.”

“Okay, eleven. No point wasting them.”

“All right, but we probably do need to eat at some point. And wash, at least before we go out in public.”

Ray scrubbed a hand through his hair, leaving it even more disordered. “Fine. New plan: shower, pick up the wolf, swing by the station, come back to bed, I’ll cook us something, go back to bed again.”

Fraser laughed. “Do you even have groceries?”

“Yeah, I have groceries! I can _cook,_ Fraser. Better than you can, anyway.” Ray rubbed his eyes and reached for his glasses. “Hey, remember the time the guys came round and you made those pork dumplings, and they stuck to the bottom of the pan and burned so bad they were like lumps of coal? And Dewey spat all his out, and Huey gave him hell for being culturally insensitive, ’cause you’d spun some bullshit about it being an old Inuit recipe?”

“Well, I did learn it off Innusiq, so technically that was true.”

“Yeah, and the whole time I couldn’t even look at you or I woulda just _lost_ it. You are so full of shit, it’s like a _disease.”_

“Thank you, Ray.”

Ray grinned at him and clambered out of bed. Fraser watched him scoop up his jeans and tank top and start searching for his underwear. He remembered that night clearly, how weirdly homesick the stew had made him, with its savory tang and sharp, bitter aftertaste, and how he and Ray had gotten a fit of the giggles once Huey and Dewey were gone and all they were left with was a pile of filthy dishes and a single broken pan-scrubber.

“That evening,” he said, “the pork dumpling evening…”

Ray poked his head back up from under the bed, where he was apparently looking for the boxer shorts Fraser could see hanging off the lampshade. “Yeah?”

“If I’d asked you, would you have let me stay?”

Ray spotted the boxers and went to retrieve them. “Wouldn’t have said no,” he said, his back turned.

“Oh.”

Ray glanced over his shoulder, and something changed in his expression. Tossing the clothes aside, he clambered onto the bed again, kneeling astride Fraser’s thighs. “Hey, it’s okay, you’re here now.” He ran callused fingers lightly over Fraser’s chest, tracing meaningless patterns across his ribs. “And we got an hour or two still. No point going down to the station yet.”

“I suppose no—ot,” Fraser said, his breath hitching mid-word as Ray bent to kiss the tender skin of his neck.

“So,” Ray murmured, his mouth hot and wet against Fraser’s pulse, “d’you wanna, y’know, do me?”

 _“Do_ you?” Fraser repeated.

Ray’s fingers slid downward, leaving trails of fire across Fraser’s belly. “You know what ‘do’ means, Fraser. So, d’you wanna?”

“Yes,” Fraser said automatically, and then his mind caught up in a hurry. “I mean, uh…”

Ray snickered, his breath warm on Fraser’s neck. “Okay _._ Guess that was a stupid question.”

“I mean, if, uh…is that something you’d be all right with?”

Ray’s hand slid lower still. “Do I look like I’m arguing here?”

His eyes were dark, his grip sure, his arousal obvious where he was pressed against Fraser’s hip. Clearly he wasn’t arguing here.

“You know, Ray,” Fraser muttered, “you could for once in your life just say yes.”

Ray tightened his grip, just enough to make Fraser gasp and arch up from the bed.

“Nah,” he said. “I think I’m done talking here.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


They made it to the station with Diefenbaker in tow a couple of hours later. There was no sign of Detective Haslam or their suspect, but Ray unearthed Haslam’s notepad from its not-so-secret hiding place, stashed in a desk drawer.

“Lemme just check if we got a transcript of this yet,” he said, flicking through it. “The clerk’s new here, and she’s a good kid, might give me access.”

He left Fraser and Dief sitting by his desk and came back a few minutes later with a scrap of paper.

“Okay. I just gotta log in, and then…here we go. Interview with Alex Biroczky, blah blah blah. Right, so Biroczky said that if the deal with Willie Warfield went south, Muldoon was gonna try this guy called Cyrus Bolt instead.”

“Bolt,” Fraser said, coming round to Ray’s side of the desk. “Why do I know that name?”

Ray clicked more keys. “Says here he’s a licensed arms dealer, runs a private militia in Idaho. Has family links to a white supremacy organization called the Fathers of Confederation.”

“Ah.” Fraser bent to peer at the computer screen. “Second Amendment enthusiasts. I’ve encountered them before.”

“Nice. They sound like fine upstanding citizens. Biroczky said Muldoon’s planning a meet with Bolt out near Boise. Hmm.”

“What?”

Ray tapped the screen. “That sound right to you? I mean, this guy has his own private militia, he’s running low on weaponry, so he calls a gun runner out to Idaho. Why would he shit in his own back yard?”

“He wouldn’t,” Fraser said. “So…”

“So Biroczky has to be throwing us off the scent. All eyes will be on Bolt’s place, and meanwhile…”

“Meanwhile the real deal takes place elsewhere.”

Ray nodded. “So how do we find it? We got police, Feds, ATF all busy out in Idaho. Someone oughta be tracking Muldoon, if we knew where the hell he was.”

Fraser took his father’s list from his breast pocket and unfolded it. “When he flew in and out of Chicago in the sixties, he used a small airstrip known as Trumble Fields. He’s a creature of habit; perhaps he still does.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


Trumble Fields turned out to be rundown and deserted. Fraser and Ray left Diefenbaker in the GTO and scaled the perimeter fence, heading for the single-story office block on the far side of the airstrip.

“I’m guessing they don’t get a whole lot of business,” Ray said, kicking at a pile of windblown trash as they neared the block.

Fraser jerked his head up as he caught a faint hiss. “What—” he began, and then grunted as Ray plowed into him, knocking him sideways.

“Get back!” Ray yelled. “It’s a gas canister, it’s gonna blow!”

Recovering his balance, Fraser detached himself from Ray’s grip. He went over to the small, gray cylinder that Ray had kicked loose. “It’s not a gas canister,” he said, crouching to examine it. “It’s an empty dog food can.”

Ray uncurled slowly from his brace position, lowering his arms. “It is?”

“Yes, and I believe that hissing sound was just the office’s heating system coming online. In any case, if the ATF’s info is correct, the gas that Muldoon is trying to sell isn’t the type that causes explosions. It’s a nerve gas, highly toxic. If one of his canisters had leaked, we’d know about it.”

“Yeah? How would we know about it?”

“Well, mainly because we’d be dead.”

“Oh. Okay. Good.” Ray glanced down at himself, apparently checking he was all still there. He brushed some dirt from his jeans. “I’m okay, I just panicked a bit. Me and explosions, we’re not good buddies.”

Fraser went over to the office building and began to examine its doors and windows. “Well, Ray, few people appreciate explosions at close quarters.”

“Yeah, but not everyone’s been actively exploded before.” Ray pulled out a pocket knife and handed it to him. “I mean, there was this one time last year I was staking out an illegal poker game—you know, acting as inside guy—and they blew the whole wall out right next to me.”

“Ah,” Fraser said, running the knife blade along the base of the main window. “Were you hurt?”

“Nah, just bruises. They weren’t trying to kill anyone, it was just a set-up, a diversion to make us look the other way while another guy robbed the stash. But still…”

“Once exploded, twice shy?”

Ray nodded. “Exactly.”

The window catch gave way easily under the blade, and Fraser pulled the window open. He crawled over the sill and held the frame wide for Ray to follow him.

Inside, they found an old-fashioned office as yet untouched by the computer age, its desk cluttered with dog-eared manifests and yellowing receipts. Fraser rummaged through the mess and extracted the current week’s manifest.

“Here we go,” he said, running a finger down it. “‘03-09-1999, WTB19, HM-5528-12929, Franklin Bay’. Today’s date, WTB19 must be the airplane tail number, and I’m guessing HM stands for Holloway Muldoon.”

Ray looked up from the Rolodex he’d been flicking through. “Yeah, probably. Franklin Bay, where’s that?”

Fraser ransacked his memory. “It’s an inlet about two hundred kilometers east of Tuktoyaktuk, on the Beaufort Sea.”

“Up in the Northwest Whatevers?”

“Territories,” Fraser said. “Yes.”

“Middle of butt-freezing nowhere, then.”

Fraser frowned. “Well, not if you’re a bird. Much of the nearby coastline consists of river deltas and wetlands set aside as a sanctuary for migratory species.”

“Yeah, thanks for the wildlife special, Frase, but last I heard, Muldoon ain’t migratory. Where’s the nearest _human_ place? Y’know, with actual buildings?”

“There’s a small settlement in Paulatuk, further to the east, but nothing on the bay itself.”

Ray took the list and studied it. “So why would he be heading there? What’s the big attraction?”

Fraser tapped at the paper. “I don’t know, but the remaining numerical code might tell us.”

“Great. So what’s it mean?”

“No idea,” Fraser said, and smiled at Ray’s expression. “I suspect that’s something we’d have to go up there to find out.”

“Wait, no, no, no. We are not going up to Frozen Bird Hell in the middle of winter—”

“It’s March, Ray.”

“—to chase down some whack-job who might or might not have picked the least convenient place on earth to stage a weapons deal.”

“Ray…”

Ray raised a hand, cutting him off. “I’m not doing it, Fraser.”

Fraser sighed. “You did say, just this morning, that we should make the most of the time we had together. Technically there are eleven days of that left.”

“Yeah, in _Chicago!_ I never signed up for road trips!”

“Plane trips,” Fraser corrected.

Ray glared at him. “Road trips, plane trips, either way you’re gonna get us both killed.”

“Ray…”

“No, you listen to me! You give me one reason why we should risk our skinny asses chasing Muldoon up to the Territories. That is way out of our jurisdiction, we have no authorization—”

“It’s in _my_ jurisdiction.”

“That’s not the point, Fraser! There’s more to life than dying!”

Fraser bowed his head, wondering whether he ought to walk away, deal with the problem himself. Perhaps he should have done that from the start. But this was _Ray,_ and Ray always listened, always weighed up the options, even if he chose his own path regardless. And he hadn’t said no, he’d asked _why._ Steeling himself, Fraser took a deep breath.

“On the night of November 5th 1917, Lieutenant Henry Fraser of the First Division of the Canadian Corps was holed up in a dugout near the Belgian city of Ypres, waiting for the order to attack. Three hours before dawn on November 6th, with darkness still cloaking the battlefield, orders finally arrived. He and his men scrambled out of their trench and ran across the bomb craters of no-man’s land, aiming for the high ground held by the German army. Torrential rain had made a mud bath of the whole area, and Lieutenant Fraser found himself floundering through a thigh-deep quagmire, hauling his rifle and ammunition with him. He clambered over rat-gnawed corpses from many nations, some of them dismembered and faceless, all of them rotting in the mud. He ran through the stench of voided bowels and decomposing flesh, and felt the ground shift beneath him as bodies gave way. But he and his men kept going, staggering through the darkness, and ducking as artillery shells whined overhead.

“He’d crossed the first two hundred meters when a shell struck close by, showering him with filth. He recognized the odor at once: the garlicky reek of sulfur mustard, or mustard gas, an invention first used by the Germans earlier that year. He fumbled for his mask, but it was too late; the poison was already coating his skin and seeping into his lungs. He knew that a dose that high was likely to be lethal, and he knew he would take a long time to die.

“Two of his men carried him back to the trenches and then to a field hospital, where he survived for another week as mustard-colored welts and blisters swelled up all over his skin and inside his throat. His last letter home, dictated to a nurse as he lay blinded and gasping for breath, read, ‘Did my best. Not sure I’ll make it.’ He passed away later that night.”

Ray was silent for a long time, staring at the blank white wall of the flight office.

“Relative of yours?” he asked at last.

“My great-uncle, at Passchendaele. My grandfather kept all his letters home.”

“And this nerve gas of Muldoon’s could do that kind of thing? Kill like that?”

Fraser nodded. “If not worse. Let loose on a big American city, it could kill thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands.”

Ray exhaled hard. “All right. Okay. Say we got a flight, went up to, uh, Lincoln Bay, could we set up an ambush before Muldoon arrives?”

“Franklin Bay,” Fraser corrected.

Ray grimaced. “Right. Franklin Bay. So could we do that?”

“Not without chartering a small aircraft of our own, which would be hard to conceal on open tundra.”

“So how do we stop him?”

Fraser nodded at the office window, toward the open hangar on the other side of the airstrip. “Well, we have one way of getting there. See that tail number? WTB19. We can hitch a ride with him.”

“You gotta be kidding me!”

“Ray, look, he’s due to leave in two hours. All we need to do is conceal ourselves on the aircraft before he arrives, and then we can either stop him here or intervene once we get to Franklin Bay.”

Ray stared at the hangar, emotions warring openly in his expression. “Okay,” he said finally. “Eleven more days. _Then_ we’re done.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


Lisa blinked, opened her eyes, and found herself in the real world again. Ray’s apartment, familiar enough but quieter than usual. No music playing, no sign of life.

She glanced round cautiously, checking the place was empty. Maybe that was what felt so strange about it. She hadn’t been here in Ray’s absence before. Then she realized what else was odd: the apartment was tidier than usual. There were just as many dirty coffee mugs as ever, but someone had collected them up and left them by the sink, as if interrupted in the middle of some sort of dishwashing intervention, and all the couch cushions had been lined up ruler-straight.

Lisa counted out another thirty seconds and then poked her head into the bedroom. The duvet on the bed had been neatly folded back to air the sheets, the used clothing was stacked in a laundry basket, and there were—eww!—condom wrappers in the trash bin, which was something she absolutely had not needed to know. Backing away hurriedly, she returned to the lounge.

She hadn’t seen Ray with any girlfriends lately, but it was reassuring that he had company. Maybe this time it would last for more than one date. She bent to examine the calendar on the fridge for clues, but as usual its scrawls and squiggles meant nothing to her.

A slight noise made her whirl round. A gray-haired man was standing a few feet from her, a complete stranger in a scarlet tunic, identical to the uniform that Ray’s friend had been wearing at the police station that last time. He was staring right at her, almost as if he could see her.

“Great Scott!” he said.

She blinked hard. Yep, he was definitely looking right at her, which was…impossible, wasn’t it?

“Hi?” she said tentatively, and winced as his eyes widened. Yup, definitely hearing her too.

“But you’re, you’re…” he began.

“Dead?” she offered. “Yeah. Sorry.”

“Good Lord.” He examined her critically, and she drew herself up to her full five-foot-nothing, her hand going automatically to rub at her cheek where the nasal tube used to itch. His own fingers were gripping the top of the sofa, their tips ghosting just a fraction through its surface, as if it wasn’t quite solid. Not an optical illusion, she realized in surprise; he had the same strangeness she did, the same disconnect with the world around him. Whoever he was, he wasn’t really _here_.

“So you are…?” she said, hoping a straight question might actually work.

The appeal to courtesy seemed to snap him back to attention. “Ah, sorry, I don’t believe we’ve been introduced. Sergeant Robert Fraser of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, at your service.”

He held out his hand, and she shook it, shivering at the sudden solidity of his touch. So that was what her own world felt like.

“Fraser?” she asked. “Then you must be…”

“Benton’s father, yes.” He nodded toward the bedroom door. “I assume you belong to the Yank.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Ray, you mean? He’s my little brother.”

The old man sniffed dismissively. “Well, Benton won’t be here long. He’s transferring back to Canada in a few days’ time.”

“Oh. Okay.”

He nodded, apparently satisfied by this. “I won’t be here long either, obviously. Apologies if I’m trespassing on your hospitality meanwhile.”

“Um, that’s okay. I guess we’re both kind of trespassing on Ray’s.”

His expression relaxed into a smile, and he sat down on the sofa, balancing his hat on one knee. “I suppose we are, at that. So you know my son?”

“Not really, no.” She went to perch in her usual spot on the windowsill, swinging her legs up and resting her head against the brickwork. “I’ve seen him down at the police station a couple times, though. He’s the tall, dark-haired man in the red coat like yours?”

The old man nodded. “That’d be him. He’s a good lad, on the whole. Not the brightest when it comes to”—he gestured toward the bedroom with evident distaste—“matters of the heart, but he’s still young. He’ll learn.”

“Ray seems to like him.”

“Yes, well, that’s as may be.” The old man smoothed the brim of his hat, brushing off some imaginary lint. He was perhaps sixty or seventy years old, Lisa thought, and not much like his son in looks, but he had similar mannerisms, as well as the same square posture. “So, do you do this sort of thing a lot?” he went on. “Bump into other deceased persons, I mean?”

Lisa shook her head. “Nope. You’re the first.”

“I see.” He paused for a moment. “I suppose what I’m getting at is whether you have what one might call a _plan_ here.”

Lisa laughed. “You think I wanna spend my time hanging around like this? Show me how to go and I’ll go.” She held the old man’s pale blue gaze until he blinked and looked away. “Oh,” she said, in sudden realization. “You don’t know how, do you? Otherwise you wouldn’t be here either.”

He winced, his fingers tightening on his hat, and she felt a rush of pity for him. She opened her mouth to apologize, but he swung round abruptly, staring at the apartment door as if he’d heard something.

“What?” she asked, straining to listen.

“Can’t you feel that?” he said. “Can’t you tell the connection’s stretching? He’s leaving—my son’s leaving. He’s going northward, and fast.” He got to his feet and stuck his hat back on. “Excuse me, I need to get going.”

“Wait, where? What connection?” But even as she spoke, she felt a weird pulling sensation in her chest, an empty yearning for something already almost out of reach.

“Wait,” she said, scrambling down from the windowsill. “Wait, show me how!”

The old man straightened his tunic and took a deep breath. “Good luck, young lady,” he said. “I may yet see you on the other side.”

And before she could stop him, he stepped bodily through the wall and was gone.

  
  


* * *

Fraser crouched lower behind the packing crate, Ray’s grip tightening on his wrist.

“I’ll just…” he began, in a whisper pitched below the roar of the engines.

Ray shook his head. “Stay there,” he hissed. “I’ll go.”

Concealing themselves on the airplane had been easy. Coming up with a viable plan to overpower Muldoon and all five of his men wasn’t proving so straightforward.

Fraser craned his neck until he could see the rest of the cargo bay. Three more crates took up most of its space, alongside a stack of duffel bags, their fabric distended by something weighty and angular, presumably weaponry. No one was guarding it, Muldoon’s crew having chosen the relative comfort of the cockpit and flight deck instead.

Adjusting his backpack, Fraser leaned farther out. Ray nudged his shoulder. “At least take this,” he whispered.

There was a pause, a click, and then Fraser felt the cold, unfamiliar weight of Ray’s gun in his hand. He hefted it, checking its balance. He never carried in Chicago, but they’d been flying for hours; they must be well into Canadian airspace by now.

He got to his feet and crept towards the flight deck, hoping to catch Muldoon alone, or at least overhear his plans. Two careful steps, four steps, six steps, with Ray not far behind. Fraser had almost reached the doorway when the plane suddenly lurched, throwing him sideways into the stack of weaponry. Ray grabbed at him, and he sprang back up, hoping the engine noise had drowned out the clatter.

Luck wasn’t on their side, however. The doorway to the flight deck darkened as a burly figure filled it—Muldoon himself, gun in hand.

Fraser darted back, hearing the faint scuffle as Ray slid out of sight behind the crate. His fingers clenched tighter on his weapon. No one would blame him for firing in cold blood. No one would even need to know, except Ray, and Ray would understand. The slightest bit more pressure on the trigger, and he’d have his revenge.

He took another breath, and knew he’d hesitated too long. Muldoon was advancing, yelling for backup, and one of his men has appeared behind him already, brandishing a gun.

“Drop your weapon!” the man snarled at Fraser.

Fraser looked from the man to Muldoon and back, and then lowered Ray’s gun slowly to the deck. He straightened again, his gaze locked on Muldoon. He found he remembered him from childhood after all—a thickset man with a misleadingly pleasant face, who’d once watched him skating on the pond by his aunt’s barn, and had laughed when Fraser fell and cut his chin.

“Well, well, what do we have here?” Muldoon drawled. He cocked his head. “Hey, haven’t I seen you somewhere before?”

Fraser took a surreptitious step closer to the crates. He was one man against two, but they didn’t know about Ray. “My name is Constable Benton Fraser, Royal Canadian Mounted Police,” he said, playing for time. “I’m arresting you on suspicion of weapons trafficking, homicide, and other charges to be determined. I suggest you come quietly, given that any gunshot damage to the fuselage is liable to depressurize the airplane.”

Muldoon’s eyes widened, and then he broke into a laugh. _“Benton?_ You’re Bob and Caroline’s boy? Well, I’ll be damned. Aren’t you just a chip off the old block?” He raised his gun and squinted along the barrel. “Too bad you’re also the end of the line.”

Fraser waited, his jaw clenched. In the corner of his eye he could just see Ray, crouched behind the nearest crate.

Muldoon nodded at the guard. “Open the hatch,” he ordered. “No one’ll find the body out here.”

The guard hesitated. “But wouldn’t that depressurize the plane, boss?”

“Not at this altitude, you idiot! Open it!”

The guard did as he was told, unlatching the exit hatch and swinging it wide. The roar of air past the hatchway rose to a deafening howl, and Muldoon raised his voice.

“Where do you want the bullet, Benton? Head shot? Or maybe I should let you bleed out through your guts, the way your mother did. I’m told it’s a slow and painful way to die.”

Fraser slowly shifted his weight onto the balls of his feet. A flicker in the shadows told him Ray was poised to spring too, but there was no way Ray would reach Muldoon before he was gunned down. Fraser spread one of his hands slightly, flattening it towards the deck to tell Ray to stay put.

Muldoon was smiling now, the same sadistic smile that Fraser remembered from childhood. “Was it you who found her, Benton? Lying in a pool of her own blood, the way I left her? Poor Caroline. She was always so trusting.”

Fraser shook his head. “You don’t get to say her name.”

Muldoon nodded at the guard, who stepped away. Fraser took a quick breath. He might not reach Muldoon, but he was ready to die trying.

As if in slow motion, he saw Muldoon’s finger tighten on the trigger. He tensed to launch himself forward, but then gasped as someone slammed into him instead, knocking him back. His hand smacked into the side of the hatch; he scrabbled for purchase, missed it, flailed at the empty air. Then he was falling through the hatchway, gasping for breath as his assailant tumbled out after him. It was Ray, he realized with horror, his coat flapping wildly as they plummeted from the aircraft.

“Ray!” Fraser yelled. “Ray, don’t…”

But he was pinwheeling now, his stomach lurching. The ground was a blur of white, hurtling up towards him impossibly fast.

“Ray!” he yelled again, but he knew he’d run out of time. He was still screaming as he hit the snow.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Fraser came back to consciousness surrounded by whiteness, his limbs heavy and immobilized. For a moment he lay there gasping, waiting for the muffled light in the distance to envelop him, and for…what? Choirs of angels to sing him to his rest? He blinked dizzily, and some of the whiteness dropped from his lashes onto his cheeks. Real snow. Of course it was real snow. This wasn’t heaven, it was _Canada._

He started to struggle, flailing and floundering his way up through the soft white powder toward the light. He wasn’t buried all that deep; after only a couple of meters his hands broke through the surface. He hauled himself onto the snow bank’s crust and collapsed there, leaning heavily on the rucksack of supplies still strapped to his back.

The airplane was just visible, a vanishing smudge in the distance, its engine a tinny whine echoing from the mountain face above. Fraser shivered, realizing how narrow an escape he’d had. He’d landed just above the tree line, in soft, deep snow. A little lower and he would have hit coniferous forest, a little higher and it would have been bare, wind-blasted rock.

 _Mountains,_ he thought in bewilderment. Tall, snow-capped mountains, too tall to be anywhere in the Northwest Territories, let alone the flat, frozen tundra of Franklin Bay. So where on earth was he?

He blinked again and became aware of a muffled yelling, just audible above the whistle of the breeze.

“Ray?” he called, looking round. “Ray, where are you?”

The yelling intensified, coming from somewhere close by. Scanning the snow banks above him, he spotted another patch of broken snow a few meters away. He staggered over and began shoveling with both hands, chopping the semi-packed snow into blocks and flinging them aside. After a minute’s digging he was waist deep, and in another minute his hands hit solid flesh.

“Ray?”

“Fr…Fr…arghhh!” Ray thrust his head free, his shouts rising into one continuous howl of panic.

“Ray? Calm down and I’ll pull you out. Ray? Ray? Ray!” Fraser tugged Ray’s shoulders loose and shook him. “Be quiet! You’ll set off an avalanche!”

There was a sudden, shocked silence, broken only by their heavy breathing. Ray’s hat had come off, and the spikes of his hair were white with snow.

“Right,” Fraser said, his heart hammering. He shoved his hands under Ray’s armpits. “Good. Now hold still and tuck your arms into your sides. Think of something aerodynamic—an arrow, for example, or a bullet.”

“Bullet,” Ray gasped. “Okay.”

Fraser wedged his own legs firmly into the snow and hauled as hard as he could. For a moment nothing happened, and then the snow gave way and he tumbled backward, with Ray sprawled on top of him.

He lay there for a few seconds, catching his breath and wincing as the rucksack dug into his back. At least they still had the supplies, he thought. At least he’d had the presence of mind to take a detour to the Consulate to drop Diefenbaker off and change into winter clothing before boarding the plane. “This _is_ my winter coat,” Ray had grumbled, but he’d eventually bowed to Fraser’s insistence that there was Chicago winter and then there was _subarctic_ winter. And here he was, his borrowed parka covered in snow but thick and weatherproof, its quilted fabric soft beneath Fraser’s grip.

“Good,” Fraser said, letting go of it with an effort. “Right. Come on, we need to get moving. It’s not long off nightfall, and Muldoon has a considerable head start on us.”

Ray groaned and rolled aside, letting Fraser get to his elbows. The ground was unexpectedly hard under Fraser’s hands, and he glanced down to see ice-coated rock. The snow bank they were sprawled on lay in a shallow scrape between stretches of bare shale.

“Come on, Ray,” he said, hauling himself to his knees. “This is no time for dawdling.”

Ray stirred, but then let out a yelp of pain. “Fuck, I…I can’t. You go.”

Fraser looked over at him, checking him properly for the first time. He was crouching head down, his face contorted, and there was something strange—horribly strange—about the way his legs were bent. How deep was the snow he’d fallen into?

Fraser scrambled over and ran his hands down Ray’s legs. “What’s wrong?”

“Dunno,” Ray gasped. “Gonna be sick.”

And he turned his head aside and vomited quietly and desperately into the snow. His right pant leg had been ripped open, the skin beneath scraped and bruised, but his left leg was in a far worse state. When Fraser folded the bloodied cloth away, he found torn flesh glinting with paler fragments. He pushed down his nausea and forced himself to look closer. There was exposed bone, yes, but something else there too.

“Metal,” he said. “There’s a metal plate in here. You’ve broken this before.”

Ray nodded shakily, wiping his mouth. “Told you already. The time that guy robbed the poker game, remember?”

“The one who set the explosive device as a diversion? You told me you weren’t badly injured.”

“Not by the bomb, by the _car._ He drove his car straight at me afterward, knocked me down. That’s how I ended up in the hospital. ’85 Firebird, shitty car even without the bloodstains.”

“You stopped to identify the _model?”_

Ray tried to grin, although it came out more like a grimace. “You would’ve too.”

“Yes, but I have a photographic memory,” Fraser said. “I can’t help it.”

Ray shrugged. “You weren’t around, and I needed the plate. Anyway, he caught me in an alleyway, eight feet wide with nowhere to go, so I ended up with a bunch of metalwork to fix my leg back together. If you kicked my shin now, you’d get a sore toe.” He winced. “Only don’t, ’cause it hurts like hell.”

He’d gone pale and and was beginning to tremble, and yet somehow he was still managing full sentences. Fraser had never doubted Ray’s physical courage, but this was a fortitude beyond what he’d witnessed before. He examined the wound again, ripping the cloth further apart to see its full extent. It was bleeding sluggishly, bright crimson dripping down and staining the snow. He cast his mind back over his first aid training. The most important thing here was not to panic, or at least not to let Ray know he was panicking. Tibia-fibula fractures wouldn’t cause enough blood loss to endanger life, would they? He didn’t think so. The pain must be unimaginable, though, and there was no way Ray could walk on it. They had no transport, either, unless they could cobble together some sort of sled.

Fraser pulled his spare scarf from his pocket, twisted it into a ring, and covered the wound with it. “Hold that there for a minute,” he said, and shrugged off his backpack. He tugged out the first aid kit and unwrapped one of the dressings.

“Hold still, Ray,” he said. “I need to bandage this properly, and I’m going to have to straighten your leg first.”

Ray tried to sit up. “No, no, no! Just bandage it like it is!”

“I can’t. There’s bone protruding from—”

“God, no, I don’t wanna know!” Ray spat again onto the snow. “Got any painkillers in there?”

Fraser rummaged in the kit. “A bottle of aspirin, but that’s an anticoagulant. You shouldn’t take it when you’re bleeding.”

Gritting his teeth, Ray moved his good leg aside, giving Fraser room to work. “Forget it. Nothing short of morphine’s gonna touch this, anyway.”

Fraser nodded and bent to his task, trying not to think about how Ray knew that. He did his best to keep his hands steady in spite of Ray’s gasps of agony, but by the time the leg was bound up and splinted to its neighbor, Ray was shaking visibly, and almost as white as the snow around him.

“All done,” Fraser said at last, sitting back and tidying away the first aid kit.

“Okay,” Ray muttered, and tried to move his legs. “Christ, that hurts. No way I’m gonna be able to walk on it.”

“You don’t have to. I’m going to set up camp down by those trees and carry you there.” Fraser zipped up the backpack and glanced round at the surrounding peaks. To the east and west they formed formidable barriers, dipping down slightly to a col at the northern end, while to the south a glacial valley wound out of sight. Could they be somewhere in the Rockies, or the Coast Mountains? He flipped mentally through the atlas he’d pored over as a child, his grandfather’s old atlas, its pages soft and smeary with use. Right up in the northernmost part of British Columbia’s coastline, the land folded and fragmented into countless islands and fjords whose names he’d traced over and over: Queen Charlotte Sound, Hecate Strait, Portland Inlet, Observatory Inlet, and dozens of others. He thought he remembered a Franklin Bay too, far inland, where the northernmost fjord thrust deep into the province as if it might one day reach the Beaufort Sea.

“5528-12929!” he said. “Of course!”

Ray raised his head a little. “Huh?”

“The number in the flight manifest,” Fraser said. “It wasn’t a code, it was a set of coordinates! Fifty-five degrees and twenty-eight minutes north, one hundred and twenty-nine degrees and twenty-nine minutes west. It’s Franklin Bay, just not the one I was thinking of.”

Ray’s eyes slid closed. “Okay.”

Fraser looked around again. If he was reading the terrain correctly, they were somewhere to the south of Whittaker Peak, only a couple of days’ hiking from the rendezvous coordinates. On his own, he might be able to make it there before Muldoon could double back from Diamond Head, the nearest land flat enough to land a plane on. But carrying Ray would triple that, if they made it at all.

First things first, he told himself firmly. Shelter, warmth, and food. Muldoon would have to wait. He noticed a smear of crimson across Ray’s cheek and reached to wipe it away with his thumb.

“Blood?” Ray asked, rubbing at the spot himself.

“Only from your leg. Don’t worry, you don’t have any facial injuries other than bruising, which should heal without issue.”

“Right. I mean, that’s my top priority, ’cause I’m the pretty one here.”

“Exactly so.”

Ray started to laugh and then winced. “God, my mouth’s so frozen it _hurts._ Why the hell would you wanna live in a country where it hurts to laugh?”

Fraser retrieved Ray’s hat, brushed the snow from it, and pulled it carefully over Ray’s scalp, making sure his ears were covered. “You are, though,” he said. “And the brave one, too.”

“Uh-huh. Squeaking like a girl every time I gotta move my leg.”

“You tackled an armed felon, Ray, and then jumped out of a low-flying plane onto solid ground. You must have known your leg would never stand the impact.”

Ray scratched at his woolly hat. “Now that I think about it, the doc did say no extreme sports, no sky-diving. I said, ‘Trust me, not gonna.’ Didn’t have time to think about it at the time, though.”

“As is so often the case.”

Having packed up his gear, Fraser made an exploratory trip to the tree line and then carried Ray down over his shoulder, trying to ignore the grunts of pain that accompanied every step. He’d staked a lean-to with spruce branches under the overhang of a vast erratic boulder left there by a long-ago glacier, and he laid Ray on the cleared ground beneath it. With careful hands, he undid the straps binding Ray’s legs together and rebound the broken limb to a stout length of spruce.

Ray leaned back against the boulder, closing his eyes. “I don’t get it,” he muttered. “My leg’s so cold it’s numb. How can it hurt this much when it’s numb?”

“You know, Ray, pain perception is to a large extent psychosomatic. You might find that if you concentrated harder on—”

“If you try and lecture me about mind over matter, Fraser, I’m gonna stomp on your leg so hard it snaps, just so you know.”

“Ah. Fair enough. Just make sure you use your good foot.” Fraser retrieved his hatchet from his backpack. “I won’t suggest meditation, then, but at least try to keep still while I fetch firewood.”

The hatchet was a lightweight one, too small for anything much more substantial than saplings, but there was no shortage of fallen trees not far from the boulder. Fraser had cut a substantial bundle of branches by the time he noticed a flash of scarlet between the fir trunks.

“Evening, son,” his father said, stepping out from behind one of the trees.

“Dad.” Fraser wiped the hatchet blade clean on his pant leg. “I was wondering when you’d show up.”

His father nodded toward the heap of firewood. “You’ll be needing more than that, Benton. It gets cold out here at night, especially this high up. Not Inuvik cold, but…”

“I’m cutting more. And unless you happen to have an ax to hand, I’m _busy.”_

“Right. I’ll leave you to it, then.”

“Good.” Fraser bent to strip the branches from a fallen pine, but when he straightened up, his father was still standing there.

“I know it’s hard,” his father said. “If it were me and your mother—”

“You’d leave,” Fraser interrupted, bundling the pine branches together and adding them to his stack. “You always left.”

“Only for the greater good, son! Because it was my duty! Of course, you were too young at the time to understand that.”

“Oh, I understood it just fine, and so did Mom. That didn’t make either of us any less alone.”

His father was silent for a few moments. “The Yank might survive, you know,” he said at last. “You’ll only be gone for a few days. And in any case, it’s one man’s life weighed against thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands.”

“Thanks, Dad, I can do the math.”

His father frowned and turned to leave. “Do the math, then,” he said over his shoulder, as he stepped away among the trees, “and do your duty.”

Fraser set to work with his hatchet again, wishing he could lose his temper and lash out—perhaps even punch a tree, as Ray might have done. Instead, he kept cutting until he judged he had enough firewood to keep a small fire going for three or four days. When he got back to camp with the final load, he found that Ray had made a circle of stones on the bare ground beside the lean-to. Ray watched him lay the kindling in it and light a fire.

“It’s getting late,” Ray said quietly, once the flames had caught. “You should probably get going.”

Fraser looked up at him, startled, and saw the understanding in his eyes. “Ray, I wish I had a choice. Even if it hadn’t been for Muldoon, there’s no other way to fetch help.”

Ray nodded. “S’okay. I figured. You gonna be okay hiking in the dark?”

Fraser glanced at the sky, a darkening indigo beyond the spruce boughs. “It’s a clear night, with a quarter moon reflecting off the snow. I’ll be fine.”

“Okay.”

Fraser got up and went over to Ray, wrapping an arm around his shoulders and pulling him close.

“You’ll be all right,” he said, hoping it was true. “The important thing is not to let the fire go out. And watch out for bears.”

“There are _bears?”_

“The local grizzly population has been doing quite well in recent years, yes. But I haven’t seen any signs of dens nearby—bears generally prefer sheltered, leeward slopes—and in any case they’re not likely to be out of hibernation at this time of year. Mountain lions are probably more of a threat than bears.”

“There are _lions?”_

“Mountain lions, yes, a few. But they’re not likely to find you if you don’t attract their attention. Just stay where you are, keep the fire going, and if you do see one, try yelling and throwing rocks at it.”

Ray grabbed a couple of spare chunks of shale and cradled them in his lap. “Rocks. Okay.”

“You’ll be fine,” Fraser repeated, as firmly as he could. “I won’t be long.”

Ray nodded as if he believed it. “I know. And you still owe me ten days, so…”

Fraser hugged him closer. “There you go, then. I always honor my debts.”

He got up reluctantly and gathered his belongings, leaving behind the first aid kit, the packet of trail mix, and what little spare clothing he possessed. He bent to press a last kiss to the top of Ray’s head, the wool of Ray’s hat dry and scratchy against his lips.

“Duty calls,” he said.

He glanced around once more to fix the location in his memory. Settling the rucksack on his back, he pulled up his scarf to cover his nose and set off toward the northern pass without allowing himself to look back.

  
  


* * *

  
  


The first time Fraser spotted the dark shape breaching the surface of the fjord, he thought it was a gray whale, or possibly a humpback. Then he smiled and shook his head at himself, remembering how early in the year it was. The fjord itself was too large to freeze over at such moderate temperatures, but ice lay thick on all its feeder streams. The gray whales and humpbacks that spent their summers here would still be in their southern breeding grounds, thousands of kilometers away. He shaded his eyes, half blinded by the inlet’s glinting surface. It had to be a killer whale, then, a year-round resident of these temperate coasts.

He lowered his backpack onto a clear patch of shoreline and sat down next to it with a sigh of relief. Five minutes’ rest, he told himself. Five minutes to clear his head before setting off again toward Diamond Head. He’d been hiking for a day and two nights now, with only an hour or so for sleep, and he couldn’t afford to let his muscles cool and stiffen up.

He stretched out, propping his aching feet on an ice-coated rock against which saltwater was lapping sluggishly. The whale was still just about visible in the distance, its angular fin cutting through the waves a kilometer away on the far side of the inlet. Fraser scanned the horizon for the rest of the pod, but the whale seemed to be solitary, a lone explorer of this secluded bay.

He checked his watch: thirty seconds of his allotted time remained. He was hauling himself to his feet and tugging his backpack up when he heard the ice splintering on a puddle behind him. He swung round, reaching automatically for his hatchet and cursing himself for sitting down in bear country without checking his surroundings properly.

There was no bear to be seen, however. Nothing behind him at all. The realization that the footstep had sounded more human than ursine was still filtering through to his exhausted mind when something slammed into the side of his head, and everything went black.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Fraser awoke face down, with a metal grating digging into his cheek. He groaned and rolled over, tugging at his bound wrists. He was lying in a narrow passageway in a dimly lit basement or bunker of some kind, lined by steel compartments covered in switches and valves. A metal ceiling rose less than two meters above his head. 

He groaned again and heaved himself into a sitting position. The grille beneath him was vibrating, and the walls were humming with a low, insistent rumble. No one else was in sight, but he knew it was only a matter of time. He had to get out of here—just as soon as he figured out how.

He blinked and looked again at the markings on the instrument panels. The lettering was Cyrillic, he realized dazedly, in neat block capitals that spelled out instructions for engine maintenance. He nearly laughed aloud before he could stop himself. This wasn’t a basement, then, and the black shape he’d seen in the water hadn’t been a whale’s fin at all, but the conning tower of a submarine. A delta-class Russian nuclear submarine, by the looks of it. Which, in fairness, wasn’t what one would _expect_ to find in a secluded fjord in British Columbia, even with a weapons dealer like Muldoon around.

Fraser sat up further, testing the ropes that bound his ankles and wrists. His backpack and hatchet were gone, and his pocket knife too. Wriggling to the corner of the nearest instrument panel, he peered round into the main gangway and then shrank hurriedly back into his niche. There were at least two people between him and the only exit.

First things first, he reminded himself. Undo the ropes, then deal with his captors. No point thinking how much easier all this would have been with Ray’s help.

He eased himself back against the instrument panel and shifted until his fingertips found the edge of the metal sheeting. His nails scrabbled for purchase, and then he tugged hard, pulling the corner loose. He hissed as he felt the sting of torn skin and the hot trickle of blood down his thumb. The edge was blade-sharp. Perfect.

It took several minutes of patient maneuvering before his bindings frayed enough to weaken. He yanked them apart at last, wincing and chafing at his hands until the circulation returned. Time to get out of here.

He checked around the corner again. One of the crewmen was a few meters away, beside what looked like radio apparatus, and the other was just beyond him, peering into the periscope. Both wore military-style fatigues, with guns at their hips.

A quick look around for something to throw revealed nothing immediately suitable, but there was a fire extinguisher fixed to the bulkhead. Fraser grabbed it, yanked its pin free, and bolted into the main gangway. The crewmen spun round, their hands going to their weapons, but Fraser was quicker. The stream of fire-retardant powder hit the first man in the face, and he fell screaming, his hands scrabbling at his eyes. Fraser snatched up his gun.

“Freeze!” he yelled at the second man. “RCMP! Put your hands up!”

It wasn’t textbook, but textbook could wait. He slammed the man against the bulkhead, grabbed his weapon, and tossed it down the gangway. A quick glance showed him a coil of rope on a nearby bunk, the same type his own wrists had been bound with. Within a minute he had both crewmen hogtied on the deck.

“Bear with me, gentlemen,” he told them. “I’ll be back shortly to read you your rights.”

Ignoring the answering torrent of abuse, he tucked the first man’s gun into his belt and ran to the access ladder. Questions were racing through his mind as he climbed. Who had brought him here and how? What if he was already miles from shore, miles from where he’d left Ray? Could he work out how to drive this thing? Could he radio for backup?

The hatch at the top of the tower swung back easily when he released its lock. He peered over its rim. They were still in the narrow fjord, hemmed in by forested slopes a half-kilometer away across the dark, near-freezing water.

A shout made him spin round. A speedboat full of dark-clad militiamen was heading for the submarine, a hundred meters off and closing fast. At the wheel stood a man he recognized as the weapons buyer, Cyrus Bolt, side by side with Holloway Muldoon.

“Stay where you are and drop your weapons!” Fraser called.

The boat swerved sharply, leaving a wake of white froth.

“And why the hell would we do that?” Muldoon yelled back.

“Because, as you’re no doubt aware, this vessel is armed with six nuclear missiles. I would advise you to surrender immediately!”

Muldoon jumped onto the boat’s foredeck, waving Bolt and his men down.

“You’re bluffing, Benton Fraser,” he shouted. “You’re no different from your father. There’s no way you’re going to fire those weapons.”

Fraser smiled wide, showing all his teeth. Of course he was bluffing. He had no intention of firing a nuclear missile, destroying and polluting this pristine wilderness, along with all of its inhabitants—and Ray. He raised the gun he’d taken from the submarine’s pilot.

“I never bluff,” he said.

He fired a single, targeted shot at the speedboat’s fuel tank, and ducked low as it exploded into a ball of flame.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Fraser stood on shore, watching the Coast Guard boat head back towards Prince Rupert with a hold full of handcuffed, blanket-wrapped prisoners, the submarine following it at a safe distance.

Behind him, his father cleared his throat. “I still say you should have let Muldoon drown.”

Fraser turned, zipping his borrowed coat higher. “Nice try, Dad, but I saw you trying to help me pull him out.”

“Instinct, that’s all.” His father tipped a liter or two of lake water from his hat before putting it back on. “The cavalry took their time to arrive.”

Fraser made a noncommittal sound. His father was aware of the distance that reinforcements had had to travel. The Prince Rupert detachment had been forced to call on the US Coast Guard for additional manpower, and Fraser didn’t want to think how much paperwork that was going to generate.

His father sniffed. “Maybe a bout of hypothermia will do him good, anyway. Give him time to contemplate his sins.”

“Maybe.” Fraser tucked the GPS tracker that the Prince Rupert sergeant had given him into his coat pocket and checked the fuel gauge on Cyrus Bolt’s abandoned snowmobile. If he headed south along the shore and then cut east over the pass, he might be able to get back to Ray before nightfall. He glanced up at his father, who was still adjusting the straps on his sodden uniform.

“Go on, then, son,” his father said. “Don’t waste the daylight.”

Fraser frowned at him.

“What?” his father asked.

Fraser rubbed his eyes. Maybe he was imagining things, but his father was starting to look oddly translucent against the forested backdrop. Almost transparent, in fact, in spite of the bright sunlight.

“You’re fading!” Fraser said, the realization hitting him with sudden dismay.

His father nodded. “I’ve solved my last crime, caught my last man. No reason to stick around.”

For a panicked moment, Fraser was six years old again and alone in all the world. He gripped the snowmobile’s handle tightly, pushing the memories away. “It’s just, I thought you were permanent.”

“Oh, son,” his father said gently, “nothing’s permanent.” He cocked his head at the empty air beside him. “Besides, your mother’s been waiting too long already.”

“My…my mom?” Fraser rubbed his eyes again, his vision blurring in the noonday sun. There was a hazy figure standing by his father, so faint that he could barely make her out. She was little more than an outline, with features as blurred and indistinct as his childhood memories of her: just an impression of dark hair, kind eyes, a mouth curled up at the corners. She reached towards him, and for a moment her fingers cupped his cheek with a touch softer than the breeze.

“Mom?” he whispered.

She looked up at him. “Ben,” she murmured, in a voice both utterly strange and as familiar as breathing. “You have to go.”

He nodded, biting his lip to keep back the tears. “I know.”

She smiled at him, a mere flicker of shade across the pale oval of her face. Then she stepped back again and took his father’s arm.

His father cleared his throat. “Godspeed, Benton,” he said. Then they turned and walked away together, slipping into the shadows between the trees.

Fraser watched them go until he could no longer make them out. Then he took a deep breath, scrubbed at his eyes with his gloved hand, and climbed onto the snowmobile.

  
  


* * *

  
  


From the borderlands, Robert Fraser raised a hand in farewell as his son disappeared beyond the trees. Then he turned back to his wife, who was smiling wryly at him.

“Don’t tell me,” she said. “You have to go.”

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he said. “I won’t be long, I promise. There’s just one more thing I have to do.”

She took his hands and squeezed them gently. “I know,” she said. “It’s all right. I’ll be waiting.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


Lisa stumbled out of nothingness and stood there gasping, blinking at the cold. She was back in the pine forest, surrounded by tall, snowy mountains, and oh dear Lord it was _freezing._

She tucked her hands beneath her armpits, hugging her flimsy dress closer. Then she noticed that her brother was still there, crouched down beside the rough shelter of branches. He looked worse than before, exhausted and disheveled.

“Ray?” she said.

He ignored her, all his attention taken up with trying to undo the fastenings of his winter coat with bone-white hands. His gloves and woolen cap lay abandoned next to the ashy remains of the campfire.

“Ray?” she repeated, kneeling down beside him. “Ray, come on, no, it’s cold. You need to keep your coat on.”

He shoved her away and tugged again at the Velcro strips, his movements clumsy and stiff. “Hot,” he mumbled. “Too hot. Gotta cool down.”

“Ray, no, you’re cold! You’re probably hypothermic; it’s the hypothermia talking. Listen to me. Listen to me!”

He hesitated, his hands on the fastenings of his coat. “Lisa?” he said wonderingly, sounding so like the little boy he’d once been that it made her chest ache. _“Lise?”_

“Hey, hey, it’s okay.” She wrapped her arms round him, hugging him close, as if she still had warmth to give him. “It’s okay,” she whispered. “It’s okay, kiddo. You just need to get the fire going again and you’ll be fine.”

“Lisa?” he said again. “I can’t…I couldn’t…I got so tired, and it hurt so much, and…”

“Ray? Can you actually hear me?”

“What?” he muttered, rubbing at his face with bloodless fingers. “I don’t…”

“Hey, it’s all right, it’s all right.” She let go of him and nudged him forward. “It’ll be fine, just put some more wood on the fire.”

He hesitated a minute longer, staring blankly at the remains of the campfire. Then he leaned forward, poked some kindling into the embers, and blew on it until the flames caught and started to lick upward.

“More,” she urged him, and he obeyed, piling larger branches on top until it was burning fiercely.

“This can’t be real,” he said, without looking round. “I mean, _you_ can’t be real. Right?”

She settled back next to him, linking her arm through his. She looked up at the fir trees, narrow and lumpy under their coating of snow, and at the vast, rocky peaks beyond.

“I don’t know,” she said. “They say the air’s thinner up here. Maybe the walls between life and death are thinner too.”

“Uh, that’s kinda dumb.”

“Hey, I don’t make the rules.”

He shivered, and she snuggled closer to him. “Put your hat and gloves back on, Sprout,” she said, and he did so, holding his hands out to the flickering flames.

Lisa had never liked ice or snow, had never liked the ache of chilled air settling in her lungs. She could still remember the last time she’d been this cold: her friend Chrissie’s fifteenth birthday party, when Chrissie’s parents had taken the whole class skating. She remembered how her friends had teased her for falling over, as if ballroom dancers should somehow be natural figure skaters. And then, after that one bad tumble when she hit the side of the rink and her leg wouldn’t stop hurting, how the ER doc had pulled her mom aside and told her the leg wasn’t broken but they’d found something else, a shadow on the x-ray that shouldn’t have been there. “We need to do another scan,” he’d said, and that was the last time Lisa had gotten to go skating.

She blinked, dismissing the memories. The campfire was roaring now, its heat searing her face even as her back ached with cold. She thought of Ray’s companion out there in the darkness, trying to find his way back to civilization.

“Your friend,” she said, “the one who was here earlier, how long did he say he’d be?”

“Fraser? Couple days to hike out, couple back, maybe. I dunno how long it’s been, though. I kinda lost track.”

“He’s coming back here himself?”

Ray shrugged. “He always comes back. I mean, last time it took him a year, but…” He shot her a rueful grin, but his eyes were bright all the same. He clearly had no doubt of his friend’s return. Lisa thought of the fear she’d seen on Fraser’s face as he turned away and slung his backpack on his shoulders, fear that he’d hidden from Ray, but that had been plain as day in the instant before he tugged his scarf over his nose and set out over the pass.

Watching Ray’s expression soften now, Lisa realized something else, something she should have noticed before.

“Your friend,” she said tentatively, “he’s kinda cute?”

“He’s _gorgeous,”_ Ray corrected instantly. He ducked his head, laughing; she could feel his shoulders shaking, and not with cold this time. She leaned into him.

“Kinda old, though.”

“Hey!” Ray protested. “He’s younger than me!”

“He is?”

“Little bit, yeah.”

She tucked her hand into the crook of his elbow and rested her head on his shoulder. Ridiculous, still, that her little brother could be this tall. Ridiculous that he could be, what, almost forty now?

“You got old, Sprout,” she said.

“Sorry.”

“Nah, it’s okay.”

They were quiet for a few minutes, watching the flames waver and the sparks flicker among the smoke. Moisture was gathering at the cut ends of the wood, bubbling and spitting as it boiled away.

“You know,” Ray said, “back then—in the hospital, I mean—they kept saying you were ‘fighting’ the cancer, like it was a battle or something. Kept saying that.”

“I know. That kinda sucked.”

“And sometimes when Dad took me to the gym, I’d pretend the punching bag was a tumor, just so I could beat the crap out of it. Fight the fight for you, you know?” He shrugged, his shoulders shifting under his thick winter coat. “Only, it doesn’t work like that. You can punch all you want, and all you end up with is bruises.”

“I know,” she said. “It wasn’t your fault, kiddo. You were, what, nine years old?”

“Ten. I was ten when you died.”

The fire gave a sudden loud crack, and a log fell sideways, sending up a flurry of sparks. Lisa watched them spin upward, fizzling away one by one into the darkness.

“I’m sorry,” Ray said, his voice very quiet.

“It’s okay.”

And suddenly it _was._ She’d always accepted it on a theoretical level, but now, sitting here in this frozen wasteland, she could _feel_ it, a presence as real and solid as the ache in her bones. It wasn’t his fault that he’d lived, any more than it was her fault that she hadn’t.

“Come on, Ray, stoke up the fire,” she said. “Don’t let it go out. It’s not time for you to join me yet.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


The snowmobile made it most of the way up to the last mountain pass, skidding and struggling along the half-broken trail. When the slope sharpened abruptly under towering cliffs, Fraser abandoned the machine and continued on foot, following his own footsteps as they zigzagged up to the col. The sun was just beginning to set in a blaze of pink and gold across a sky marked only by a few wisps of cloud. It was going to be another bitterly cold night.

As Fraser crested the pass and paused with his hands on his knees to catch his breath, he saw a thread of smoke rising from the distant trees, hanging almost vertically in the light breeze.

“Ray?” he called. For a moment he waited, as if an answer might actually come. Then he shook himself and hurried down the slope, running in fits and spurts now in spite of the hampering snow. His breath came short in the thin, chilled air, his lungs burning with the effort.

As he drew nearer to the forest, the smell of smoke intensified. The fire must still be alight, which meant…which meant Ray must still have been alive a few hours ago, at least. Fraser ran on, his boots crunching through the half-frozen remains of his own footprints.

“Ray,” he yelled again. “Ray?”

At last he could see it, the great gray boulder hunkered down among the trees. As he sprinted toward it, he saw Ray propped against its base, his eyes flickering open at the sound of Fraser’s footsteps.

“Fraser!” Ray called, trying to get to his feet. “You okay?”

Fraser hadn’t thought his aching legs could carry him any farther, but he was across the clearing between one heartbeat and the next, his arms around Ray, hugging him close.

“Hey,” Ray said, his breath warm against Fraser’s ear. “Hey, it’s okay, Frase. I’m okay.”

Fraser’s hat had come off somehow, and Ray’s hands were buried in his sweat-damp hair, clutching his scalp and then tugging him up until their mouths met and Fraser lost all the breath he had left in the overwhelming relief that Ray was _alive;_ he was alive and warm and deepening the kiss, his lips fierce and chapped against Fraser’s.

Fraser pulled away at last, gasping, and saw that Ray was grinning at him.

“So,” Ray said, “you catch Muldoon?”

Fraser laughed breathlessly and sat back, surveying him properly. Ray looked exhausted, his face pinched with pain and smeared with ash, and he was still the most beautiful thing Fraser had ever seen.

“Muldoon, yes,” he said, “and Cyrus Bolt as well, both handed into custody, and no lives lost in the process. Ray, are you sure you’re alright?”

“I’m good. Awake and everything.”

“Can I just check your—”

“Leg?” Ray gestured at it. “Figured you would.” He watched Fraser unpack his rucksack and bend to examine the bandages. “Hurts like hell.”

“Worse than before?”

“Dunno. Maybe. I’m still not gonna be able to walk on it, that’s for damn sure.”

“That doesn’t matter. A chopper’s coming to airlift us out.” Fraser unbound the remains of Ray’s pant leg to examine the dressings around his shin. There was no sign of new blood on them, and the foot had residual warmth, with normal capillary refill.

Ray hissed through his teeth. “God, don’t touch it!”

“Sorry. I had to check your peripheral circulation.” Fraser pulled the torn clothing back down over the bandages, insulating the leg as best he could. Then he rummaged in the backpack and handed Ray a couple of candy bars. “Here, take these. I’m sorry they’re all I have.”

Ray eyed the food wolfishly. “One each?”

“You have them,” Fraser said, swallowing the saliva that had flooded his mouth. “I need to go and confirm our exact location with the rescue team. I won’t be long.”

“’Kay,” Ray said, through a mouthful of chocolate. “Not goin’ anywhere.”

In the end, contacting the rescue team took Fraser nearly two hours. He’d prearranged for evacuation, but he had to hike some distance up the nearest peak before he got enough of a signal to relay the coordinates. The mountaintops were flushed pink with the last rays of sunlight, and by the time he set off again toward the valley, it lay deep in night.

“They’re coming for us first thing in the morning,” he told Ray, when he finally got back to the makeshift camp. “There’s a medevac helicopter standing by on the nearest aircraft carrier, waiting for daybreak.”

“Cool,” Ray said. “Hey, wait, you got aircraft carriers? I thought you guys were all peaceful and stuff.”

“It’s a US naval vessel, actually. We’re only about twenty-five kilometers from the Alaskan border,” Fraser pointed west and then southwest, “and less than eighty from the Pacific coast.”

Ray scratched at his stubble. “Okay, I know my head’s kinda mashed, but I was pretty sure we were up north.”

Fraser smiled. “We are, a little, but mostly west. And Franklin Bay is necessarily connected to the sea; that’s how the submarine accessed it.”

“Submarine?”

“It turned out that part of Muldoon’s weapons shipment was a delta-class Russian nuclear sub. Don’t worry, it’s safely in custody too.”

“Weird.” Ray yawned hugely, his jaw clicking. “I’ve never seen a submarine. Or the Pacific.”

“Well, perhaps we can ask the helicopter pilot to take the scenic route and show us the sights.” Fraser dragged another heap of wood to the fire and stacked it on top, so it would flare up without choking it. The flames rose on cue, deepening the blackness of the surrounding woods. “In any case, we only have to wait a few more hours. The important thing now is to keep you warm.”

“My front’s fine,” Ray said, drawing his good leg further from the blaze. “It’s my back that’s frozen. And my ass. It’s like, remember when half the wires on my toaster broke and the Pop Tarts were only cooking on one side? I’m like that, like a half-burned Pop Tart.”

Fraser nudged him forward and sat down behind him, with his back against the cold stone of the boulder and his legs either side of Ray’s. “Better?” he asked.

“Mmm.” Ray leaned back, closing his eyes, the weight of him solid and reassuring. “S’good. So you nailed all the bad guys? Got ’em all locked up in Mountie jail?”

“They will be by now. Muldoon is due to be charged with assault and homicide, along with terrorism offenses.”

“Homicide?” Ray said. “I thought you stopped him before he killed anyone.”

“This time we did, but he’d already killed two ATF agents back in Las Vegas, and there was an outstanding warrant dating from thirty years ago as well.” Fraser hesitated a moment before adding, “For the murder of my mother, in fact.”

Ray twisted round to stare at him. “Your _mother?”_

Fraser nodded.

“Jesus,” Ray said. “Sorry, I…I didn’t know. I mean, I knew she’d died when you were a kid, but…Muldoon killed her?”

“Yes. He shot her in cold blood.”

“Damn. Sorry, Fraser.” Ray sat back, frowning at the fire. “Wait, and you didn’t think to mention it before? Like, when you were trying to talk me into chasing him, you didn’t think to say, ‘Hey, Ray, we need to go nail this guy because he _killed my mom’,_ that kinda thing?”

Fraser sighed. “Well, my desire for personal vengeance was hardly relevant next to the threat he posed to thousands of other people’s lives.”

“Yeah, well, you coulda mentioned it.”

Fraser hid a smile at the fierceness of Ray’s tone. “Fine. Point taken.”

“Good.”

“Fine.” Fraser looked round at the flame-lit clearing, with its trampled snow and depleted stacks of firewood. “So, you’ve been all right while I was gone?”

“Yeah. I’ve been cold, mainly. It got pretty cold here.” Ray itched at his scalp. “Pretty weird, too. Kinda Twilight Zone-y. Not sure if I was dreaming or halfway to Deadland, but I had my sister hanging out with me here for a while. Family reunion, hypothermia-style.”

“Your sister?” Fraser hugged him closer, wondering whether he could check Ray’s pulse again without him noticing. “I didn’t realize you had a sister.”

“Yeah. She was a lot older than me, though, so it was kinda more like, y’know, having another mom. She used to boss me around all the time, and, and if I was having a bad day she was always there. That kinda thing, you know?”

Fraser nodded.

Ray jabbed at the air with one gloved hand. “She got that, um, bone cancer deal that kids get sometimes. ’69 or ’70, it woulda been when she died. ’70, I guess. That was a shitty couple years, huh?”

“Yes. Yes, I suppose it was.” Fraser glanced round at the surrounding gloom, checking for ghostly figures, but there was only darkness.

“And then I see her for the first time in maybe thirty years,” Ray continued, “and she’s just this skinny little teenager, still dressed up in that stupid ball gown, and it’s…” He trailed off, staring at the fire. “I mean, it’s not like they coulda been actual memories or anything, ’cause she’s sitting there in the dress my mom gave the undertakers to put her in, with the bruises from the IV line still in her arm, and I never even _saw_ any of that, I didn’t go to the funeral, so it’s just…it doesn’t make sense.” He paused. “Is that a thing with hypothermia? Does it usually make people go wacko?”

Fraser hesitated. What Ray was describing didn’t fit the usual pattern of temperature-induced abnormalities, but then people didn’t always remember what they’d experienced in near-death states. He thought of telling Ray how his Uncle Tiberius had died wrapped in cabbage leaves, but decided not to.

“It could have been the hypothermia, yes,” he said. “Or perhaps you saw her simply because you needed to see her.”

Ray was quiet again for a while. “Dunno,” he said at last. “I think maybe _she_ needed to see _me_.”

For a long time after that there was silence, broken only by the crackling of the fire. Then Fraser cleared his throat.

“I never had any siblings, as you know, and I don’t really remember my mother. Not really. Only as an impression, and as a series of isolated vignettes. But I remember one night, sitting with her beside a campfire like this one and telling her what I was going to be when I grew up.”

Ray shuffled a little, shifting his weight onto his uninjured haunch. “Lemme guess, a Mountie?”

Fraser smiled into the darkness. “That I don’t know. The only thing I remember is her reply. She told me I could be anything I wanted to be.”

Ray exhaled hard, his breath condensing in a backlit cloud. “Lisa used to say that, too, like it’d be true if she said it enough. But I dunno, maybe she was right. When I look back at life, add it all up, I guess I don’t have a lot of regrets. Only that I never got to go on any kind of real adventure.”

“You don’t consider this an adventure?” Fraser asked.

“Nah, I mean a _real_ one, where I get to be the hero instead of the injured guy that gets left behind.”

“Most people would consider jumping in front of a bullet considerably heroic, Ray, even without a near-lethal fall from a plane. You were willing to lay down your life for me.”

“Yeah, but I mean the kind of adventure where we climb mountains and hike across glaciers and stuff. We finally get here, and the first thing I do is break a leg and sit the whole thing out.”

“Well, you know the good thing about mountains,” Fraser said. “They’ll still be here when your leg mends.”

“Hmm. You’re assuming I’d wanna come back.”

Fraser glanced round again at the snowy clearing, the flame-lit smoke spiraling up into the freezing air, and the cold, white pinpricks of the distant stars. “Perhaps not _here_ exactly, but you could come and visit me wherever I end up stationed. If you’d like to, I mean.”

Ray snorted. “Way to make a guy feel good, Frase! You gonna wait till you get the itch, then send for me, that it? Treat me like some kind of cure for Mountie frustration?” His tone was flippant, but there was an edge to it all the same.

Fraser hesitated. “Well, no...”

“No, but what?”

Fraser sighed. “It’s not as if anyone’s _forcing_ you to go back to Chicago, Ray. You know perfectly well I’d rather you stayed.”

“Uh, no, I don’t know that _perfectly well,_ ’cause I don’t happen to be psychic.”

“Fine,” Fraser said, rattled. “Fine, if you want a formal invitation: Stanley Raymond Kowalski, I would rather you stayed.”

He could feel himself flush with embarrassment as soon as the words were out. He’d been aiming for levity, to match Ray’s tone, or at least for a workable level of ambiguity, but it had come out sounding more like…well, like something Ray might not be able to laugh off. But when he checked Ray’s face, it was bright with amusement.

“Huh,” Ray said. “So what’s in it for me?”

And Fraser tightened his grip and buried his face in Ray’s neck, his breath coming short again, because if he’d learned anything by now, it was how to tell when Ray was saying yes. And this _was_ yes; it was “fine,” and “I mean it,” and “just don’t make me say it.”

“What’s in for you?” Fraser repeated, as deadpan as he could manage. “Efficient nationalized healthcare, for one thing. Which might be useful the next time you throw yourself out of an airplane.”

Ray leaned back into him. “Good point.”

“Mmm.”

They sat there until Ray’s head started to nod and Fraser could feel his own eyelids growing heavy, pinned as he was between the chill of the boulder and the warm solidity of Ray’s body. The darkness deepened, and the fire sank gradually lower. When the last log broke in two, its unburned ends tumbling into the embers, he sighed and levered himself to his feet.

“Stay there, Ray,” he said. “I’ll only be a minute.”

When he’d fetched more wood and the fire was flaring high again, he nudged Ray forward and slid back behind him.

Ray yawned wide. “So, what’s the plan?”

“We wait for the helicopter.”

Ray rolled his eyes. “I know that. But after we get picked up and thaw out and get some food and they fix my damn leg and give me morphine and antibiotics, what then?”

“Ah,” Fraser said. “Well, my original plan was to transfer up to King’s Creek, once my Chicago assignment was over. My father’s old partner, Buck Frobisher, has been heading up the training detachment there for the last couple of years, but his old wounds have been troubling him lately, and he wants to see more of his grandchildren before they grow up, so he suggested I take over.” He paused, and the silence drew out. “Ray, I know you were hoping to get away from law enforcement…”

Ray shrugged. “Yeah, kinda.”

“And I’m aware the RCMP has its own problems,” Fraser went on. “I could hardly be unaware, given my reasons for being in Chicago in the first place.”

“I thought you went down there on the trail of the killers of your father.”

“Well, yes, to begin with, but I was a whistleblower, persona non grata. The officers whose corruption I exposed were eventually held to account, but my superiors at the time made it clear I wasn’t welcome back.”

“Huh. I didn’t know that.” Ray tilted his head. “So if you quit now, it’s gonna feel like they win after all?”

“I suppose so, in a way.”

Ray rubbed his jaw with his gloved hand, rasping against the stubble. “I guess a training detachment might be okay. Catch ’em young and teach ’em not to be assholes, kinda thing? I mean, someone’s gotta do that.”

“That was more or less my thought process, too. And while the RCMP obviously doesn’t recruit non-Canadians, the detachment would need more in the way of day-to-day management than I could provide by myself, so…”

“So we could both go?”

Fraser nodded.

“As what?” Ray asked. “Buddies?”

“Partners, if you’ll have me.”

Ray was silent for a few moments, sitting very still in Fraser’s arms. “Huh,” he said at last. “Guess I’d better get used to freezing my ass off, then.”

Fraser laughed aloud from pure happiness. “Oh, it’s not always this cold. In a few months, once the place warms up and the mosquitoes really get going, you’ll be looking forward to winter.”

Ray snorted. “I hate you, Fraser.”

Fraser bent to kiss him—this impossible, absurd man who’d never learned how to say yes, but who meant it all the same.

“And I you, Ray,” he said. “And I you.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


From her rocky outcrop far above the valley, Lisa watched the dark speck in the dawn-lit sky draw closer. As it crested the western ridge and dipped toward the forest, she could make out its bulbous body and long tail, and the blurry disc of blades whirling above it.

Down in the snowfield just above the tree line, her little brother was alternately waving at the helicopter and wincing as he jolted his injured leg. His friend was busy spreading out orange plastic sheeting to attract their rescuers’ attention, the radio clamped to his ear as the chopper’s thrumming filled the sky. Lisa was straining so hard to hear it that she didn’t notice the approaching dogsled until it was almost upon her.

She gasped and leaped backward as the lead dog came to an abrupt halt a few feet away, barking happily at her. It was an old-fashioned sled, all curved, polished wood, with eight or ten huskies strung out in front of it.

“Stop it, you fools!” the driver called, and she glanced up in surprise, recognizing his voice as that of Fraser’s father. “Sorry, not you,” he said, tipping his hat at her. “I meant the dogs. They get overexcited to be out.”

“That’s all right. I like dogs.” She nodded toward Ray and Fraser. “Have you come for those two? You’re a bit late for a rescue.”

“What? Oh, you mean with the sled? No, no, it can’t carry the living. If it could, Benton wouldn’t have had to leave his partner behind in the first place.” The old man climbed off his perch and came over to Lisa’s rocky crag. He peered down at Ray, now sprawled on the plastic sheeting and still gesticulating madly at the helicopter. “He survived, then.”

“Yeah. He’s a pretty tough cookie.”

The old man sniffed. “You know, back in Ottawa, Benton was moping around like a bobcat without its whiskers. Not a spark in him till I sent him back to Chicago. I never really got what he saw in that brother of yours. But they’re as stubborn as each other, and I guess that’s what he wanted. I could never tell that boy what to do.”

She smiled at him. “Sounds familiar.”

“Kids, eh? Ah well.” He patted her shoulder and turned back toward the sled. “Come on, time to go.”

She stared at him. “But I can’t…can I? I mean, I’m dead.”

“So are they,” the old man said, gesturing at the dogs. “Doesn’t stop them.”

Lisa looked again at the sled, and at the dogs, barking and straining at their traces. For a moment they seemed as real and solid as anything in that unearthly landscape. Then she blinked and saw that the snapping of the straps and the ruffling of the dogs’ fur was slightly out of sync with the breeze, like a semitransparent layer laid over the surface of reality.

“Come on,” the old man repeated, holding out his hand. He nodded toward the distant figures down by the tree line. “They’ll be all right now. That’s the thing with the living: in the end, you have to leave them to it.”

She took one last look at them, her vision suddenly blurring with tears. Just the cold air, she told herself; enough to make anyone blink. _Shoulders back, frame straight._ She could do this. Lifting her chin, she took the old man’s hand and let him help her into the sled.

“Besides,” he said, tucking thick robes around her and climbing onto the footboards, “we need to get back to the borderlands. There’s someone I want you to meet.”

He called to the dogs, and they obeyed eagerly, bounding into motion. The sled jolted forward and gained speed rapidly, until the snow was flying past under its runners so quickly that it took Lisa’s breath away. She touched a cautious fingertip to the churning whiteness, but it was as insubstantial now as a half-remembered dream, and she could no longer feel its chill.

Faster and faster they slid across the hazy landscape, skimming effortlessly over its surface as the dogs ran onward. For a while the sled might still have been visible from the valley, if anyone had thought to look, but the dogs were keen and swift, their trail melting into mist as they flew onward, and soon there was nothing left but the ancient peaks themselves, keeping their silent watch over the worlds of the dead and living alike.

**Author's Note:**

> The stars are out tonight, the breeze is soft and light  
> As I’m walking right back to you  
> With nothing left to hide, the tears have all been cried  
> And the girl who died is walking too
> 
> Down the dreaming road, where the light is always gold  
> The air is never cold and always fine  
> And north is always true, and you are always you  
> And I’m that girl you knew, once upon a time.
> 
> \--Mary Chapin Carpenter, _The Dreaming Road._

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Art: The Dreaming Road](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27698258) by [mekare](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mekare/pseuds/mekare)




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